MARSHMAN, Joshua (1768—1837), a Baptist missionary and Oriental scholar, was born on April 20, 1768, at Westbury Leigh, in Wiltshire, where he received a somewhat defective school education, and afterwards followed the occupation of a weaver until 1794, when he removed to Bristol to take charge of a small school there. Meanwhile he had been diligent in the cultivation of his talents, whjch were naturally good; and he was already a man of considerable acquirements when in 1799 he was sent by the Baptist Missionary Society to join their establishment at Serampore. Here, in addition to the discharge of his more special duties, he engaged with success in the study of Bengali and Sanskrit, and afterwards of Chinese, and accomplished numerous literary tasks, the more important of which are mentioned below. He received the degree of D.D. from Brown University, U.S.A., in 1811. His death took place at Serampore on December 5, 1837.

Dr Marshman translated into Chinese the book of Genesis, the Gospels, and the Epistles of Paul to the Romans and the Corinthians; in 1811 he published The Works of Confucius, containing the Original Text, with a Translation, and in 1814 his Clavis Sinica. He was also the author of Elements of Chinese Grammar, with Preliminary Dissertation on the Characters and Colloquial Mediums of the Chinese, and was associated with Carey in the preparation of a Sanskrit grammar and of a Bengali-English dictionary. See J. C. Marshman’s Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward (2 vols., 1859).