Horace Irvin Poleman, Chief of the Orientalia Division of the Library of Congress, died on November 6,1965, in the Georgetown University Hospital in Washington. He was born in Philadelphia on September 5, 1905, graduated from the College of the University of Pennsylvania in 1927, having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, received the degree of M.A. in classical languages from the same university in 1930 and the Ph.D. degree in Sanskrit in 1933. His doctoral dissertation (unpublished) was an edition and translation of the Aurdhvadehika-paddhati, a mediaeval Sanskrit text on death ritual. In 1939 he married Jenny Falk, who with their sons, Karl and Robert, survives him.