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HENRY, VICTOR (1850– ), French philologist, was born at Colmar in Alsace. Having held appointments at Douai and Lille, he was appointed profe.or of Sanskrit and comparative grammar in the university of Paris. A prolific and versatile writer, he is probably best known by the English translations
of his Precis de Grammaire comparee de l'anglais et de l'allemand and Precis . . . du Grec et du Latin. Important works by him on India and Indian languages are: Manuel pour etudier le Sanscrit vedique (with A. Bergaigne, 1890); Elements de Sanscrit classique (1902); Precis de grammaire Pdlie (1904); Les Litteratures de l'Inde: Sanscrit, Pali, Prdcrit (1904); La Magie dans l'Inde antique (1904); Le Parsisme (1905); L'Agni,ftoma (1906).
Obscure languages (such as Innok, Quichua, Greenland) and local dialects (Lexique €tymologique du Breton modern; Le Diaiecte Alaman de Colmar) also claimed his attention. Le Langage Martien is a curious book. It contains a discussion of some 40 phrases (amounting to about Soo words), which a certain Mademoiselle Helene Smith (a well-known spiritualist medium of Geneva), while on a hypnotic visit to the planet Mars, learnt and repeated and even wrote down during her trance as specimens of a language spoken there, explained to her by a disembodied interpreter.