PHILOLOGY

I.—ANCIENT PHILOLOGY.

The science of philology, like the name, is of Greek origin. Its first faint beginnings may be discerned in the age when the Pisistratidae at Athens undertook the col-

lection and editorship of the scattered poems attributed to Homer. (See the important Scholium on Plautus, Ritschl, Alexandr. Biblioth., p. 4.) In the classical period which followed, the great epic poems were more and more regarded as a text-book for study and elucidation; and to such an extent did the text of Homer serve as the foundation of all Greek training, that Plato, in his Republic, feels himself obliged to discuss formally how far such an influence should be encouraged in his model commonwealth. At the same time, the Sophists, or literary men by profession, who were the earliest students of language on its own account, began to investigate the elements of grammar and criticism with an immediate reference to the text of the old poems. Protagoras, one of the most eminent of this class of public teachers, was the first to treat of the inflections of his own language; and he noticed with due attention the machinery used for the modal distinctions of the verb, and for the genders of the noun. The first principles of syntax, namely, the relation of the subject to the predicate, and the distinction between the substantive verb as a mere copula and its use as a means of predicating existence, were perhaps not stated distinctly before the publication of Plato's Sophistes. And Aristotle from this developed his theory of the method of language, which has since held its place as the best exposition of the subject. These, however, were but the beginnings of philology, scattered over a hundred years, and appearing only as incidental hints at a time when the productive genius of Greek literature was in full vigour, and when the age of writers had not yet given place to the age of commentators. Philology, as a study furnishing a main occupation to those who embraced it, came into active operation at the end of the fourth or at the beginning of the third century B.C., when the Greek dynasty settled in Egypt established at Alexandria a museum or college and a library on a large scale, and invited to that city all the men of letters who were willing to devote themselves to a life of book-learning. As far as any one man can claim the distinction of having initiated this school of learning, the honour must be conceded to Demetrius the Phalerian, who, having come to Egypt as an exile from Athens, induced Ptolemy Soter to lay the foundation of the library, and to undertake methodically the revision of the more ancient writers, especially Homer. The undertaking thus started was carried on with increasing vigour by a series of eminent men who filled the office of chief of the museum at Alexandria, and who, besides their special employments as literary men in different fields, were critics and commentators by profession. The first six of these librarians were Zenodotus, the great Homeric editor; Callimachus; Eratosthenes; Apollonius of Rhodes; Aristophanes of Byzantium; and Aristarchus of Samothrace. By their exertions, and those of their contemporaries among the grammarians of Pergamum and the Stoics of Athens, all the details of editorial criticism were put into a systematic form. The Greek language was analysed; the parts of speech were classified; cases and other inflections received their names, and their usage was defined; the divisions of the sentence were marked by a system of punctuation; and the pronunciation was registered by the simple but ingenious contrivance of accentual marks. At the same time, the texts of the great poets, especially Homer, were settled by a most careful revision of all the materials.

From the establishment, then, of the Alexandrian school we date the origin of classical philology, or at least of a methodical and critical study of the Greek language, resting on a revision of its oldest literary remains. The period marked by the labours of the first six librarians at Alexandria also saw the first beginnings of sacred philology, which may, indeed, be regarded as an offshoot from the studies of the Alexandrian scholars. The Jews had begun to make

Ancient Philology. a collection of their sacred books as early as B.C. 446, when they were restored to their own country; and those of the nation who were settled at Alexandria were already in possession of the Pentateuch, at all events, when Demetrius the Phalerian persuaded Ptolemy Soter either to procure a translation of these books, or to add to his library the Greek version of them already in use by his Jewish subjects, which, however, he had revised and sanctioned by the Sanhedrim at Jerusalem; and the name of the version (that of the Seventy, Septuaginta), is derived from the number of that council. As other books were added to the canon at Alexandria, they were from time to time translated at Alexandria; and when the collection was completed, sometime about B.C. 130, the whole series was divided into twenty-four parts, in accordance with the number of letters in the Greek alphabet, and in imitation of the same division adopted by Aristarchus for the two great Homeric poems. As the division into twenty-two parts, according to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, was not adopted till afterwards (see Beveridge's Works, vii., p. 202, seq.), it is clear that in this important matter the procedure of the classical school established at Alexandria re-acted on the Jewish Masorets; so that classical and sacred criticism may really be traced back to one and the same origin.

Philology at Rome. The philology of Rome was merely an offshoot or application of that which had established itself in the schools of Greece. Not only was the later Roman literature entirely built up on the foundations of the Greek, but the later Greek literature was itself domesticated at Rome; and rhetoricians, grammarians, commentators, and lexicographers wrote or compiled for the benefit of the accomplished Romans no less than for the literary public still furnished by their own countrymen. Among the Romans themselves, or those who wrote in Latin, the most eminent philologists were M. Terentius Varro, the contemporary of Cicero; Atticus Philologus, the friend of Sallust and Pollio, who wrote an enormous miscellany in 800 books, called "Yay, or "Materials;" Verrius Flaccus, the tutor of the grandsons of Augustus, whose invaluable treatise De Verborum Significatione has come down to us only in the mutilated abridgment of Festus; Quintilian, the great rhetorician, who flourished under the Flavian emperors; Aulus Gellius, who was a contemporary of Hadrian and the Antonines; Macrobius, the author of the Saturnalia, and his contemporary Servius, the learned commentator on Virgil, who are referred to the age of Honorius and Theodosius; and Martianus Capella, who is usually placed at the end of the fifth century A.D. These writers treated the classical authors of Greece and Rome in the manner and spirit which the Alexandrian grammarians had exhibited in their commentaries on the older Hellenic literature; and many of them do not differ in any essential respect from the commentators who have appeared since the revival of learning in the fifteenth century.

Philology in India. Quite unconnected with any of the manifestations of philology which we have hitherto noticed, but destined at a distant period to exercise no slight influence on the science of language in general, a school of grammarians sprung up in India, and applied to their own sacred or classical literature methods virtually identical with those which had been adopted by the classical philologists. It cannot be determined at what particular date the northern tribe of the worshippers of Brahma effected the conquest of the district which they called the Arian land (Arya-dvartah), lying between the Himalayan and Vindhyan chains of mountains. From the internal evidence of the oldest writings, it is concluded that their movement from the north-west did not commence until after B.C. 1400. There can be no doubt, however, that these conquerors introduced

into India their own language, the Sanscrit, or grammatically perfect idiom, and with it their sacred literature; and that the latter, represented by the Védas, dates as far back as the fourteenth century before Christ. On the basis of this revelation (for the Védas, by their very name, claim to be a direct communication from the Supreme Being) was built up a copious literature, partly poetical and partly scientific. In process of time, the Sanscrit language, in which this literature, or the more solemn parts of it, was composed, and even the Prâcrit dialect, which represented a more vulgar and popular type of the sacred dialect, became dead languages; and the literature was studied only by the learned men of the upper classes. (See Lassen, Indische Alterthumsk. ii., pp. 1153, seq.) In India, then, as at Alexandria, a school of philology arose; and connected as their grammatical studies were with the intellectual activity of the highest functionaries in the religious and secular bodies, it is not surprising that the learned and able grammarian obtained a rank little less sacred than that of the writers whose works he expounded. The full establishment of the grammatical system in northern India is referred to the reign of King Vicramâditya, who rescued the north-western provinces of India from the Sacae, and reigned as absolute sovereign from the Punjab to the Ganges. The beginning of his epoch is fixed at B.C. 58. (Ideler, quoted by Lepsius, Chronologie der Egypter, i., p. 4.) How long before this time the philological element had existed in Sanscrit literature cannot be determined; for the grammarians of Vicramâditya's court at Oujein were, like the Masorets of the Jews, the sole editors of the sacred or classical books, and may have introduced into the texts the grammatical allusions which we find here and there. For example, we cannot but regard it as an interpolation when Krishna is made to say in the Bhagavad-Gita, an episode of the Mahâ-Bhârata:—"I am the A of letters, and the copula which connects the elements of the compound word" (aksharânâm-a-kâras asmi; dvandvas samâsikasya-cha, Bhag. Git. x. 33). The first of the Sanscrit grammarians, Pânini, is referred to a fabulous antiquity. "Pânini," says Colebrooke (Miscellaneous Essays, ii., p. 4) "lived in so remote an age that he ranks among those ancient sages whose fabulous history occupies a conspicuous place in the Puranas, or Indian theogonies. The name is a patronymic indicating his descent from Pânin; but ascending to the Paurânic legends, he was grandson of Dévala, an inspired legislator." The probability is, that the Indian scribes, like those in other countries, claimed as the author of their own theories some great personage veiled in the mist of ages, and endeavoured to exalt their own science by referring it to a sacred origin. The same attempt to give undue antiquity to a philological work is apparent in the reference of the vocabulary of Amara-Sinha to an older age. It is pretty clear that this lexicographer flourished under Vicramâditya, and was one of the nine gems of his court—a phrase which reminds us of the Alexandrian Pleiad; and it is at least probable that the Sutras attributed to Pânini were not much more ancient. The latter, at all events, found a commentator in the person of Bhartrihari, a brother of King Vicramâditya, whose Kârikâ, or metrical aphorisms of grammar, and the Vârtikas, or annotations of the inspired saint and legislator Kâtyâyanâ,¹ have nearly the same authority as the work of Pânini itself.

Those who are interested in every additional proof of the axiom, that the same causes produce the same effects, between will be gratified by observing how exactly similar the philology in India and among the Greeks and Jews. growth of philology has been not only in the Greek and Jewish schools, which had a certain connection with each other, but also in the Indian school, which, though long subsequent, must have been nearly independent of any western influences. In Central Hindostan, where Vicra-

¹ On the identification of Kâtyâyanâ and Vararuchi, see Cowell's edition of the Prâkrita-Prakâsha, Pref., p. vi.

maditya reigned, no less than in Egypt under the Ptolemies, and in Palestine after the return from Babylon, these critical and grammatical labours were stimulated by the wish to preserve an accurate knowledge of an idiom which was becoming less vernacular every day, and which contained the key to a literature regarded as classical at Alexandria, sacred at Jerusalem, and both classical and sacred at Oujain. The process in all these cases was precisely the same. The first care was to settle the texts of the most ancient and precious books. What Zenodotus, Aristophanes, and Aristarchus attempted at Alexandria, was the object of Ezra and his followers in Judea, and of the priestly or princely scholars who illustrated the glories of King Vicramāditya. The different editions of the text of Homer, and the varieties indicated by the Septuagint, as compared with the Hebrew texts of the Hebrew books, are paralleled by similar phenomena in India. For example, the great epic poem called the Rāmāyana, which describes, under the mythical form of the adventures of Rāma, an incarnate deity, the conquest of Southern India and Ceylon by the Brahminical race, appears in two distinct recensions, one of which is called the edition of the commentators, and is supposed to have been settled at Benares; the other, which belongs to the Bengal school, and is called Gaudana, from Ganda, the ancient name of the central region of Bengal, and of its capital, now destroyed.¹ The commentaries and paraphrases of the Alexandrian scholars and the Jewish Talmudists are more than paralleled by the similar efforts of the Indian pundits; and while the latter are rivalled by the Greeks only in their lexicography, neither Greeks nor Jews can vie with them in the minute and artificial accuracy of their grammatical system.

Under the Roman emperors Greek philology, which had domesticated itself in Italy from the time when the Greeks first fell under the paramount influence of the Romans, was represented by an unbroken series of rhetoricians and grammarians. Flourishing schools existed not only at Rome, Athens, and Alexandria, but in outlying places like Marseilles, Rhodes, Apollonia, and Tarsus. In the reign of Vespasian distinct provision was made for the due remuneration of the Greek teachers settled at Rome (Suet. Vesp., c. 18). Hadrian directed his efforts to the re-establishment of Athens as the principal university in the empire, and the steps which he initiated were carried out by M. Aurelius in the second century. In the school of Athens the chief professor was the occupant of the chair of rhetoric; and that his functions implied that he was the greatest philologist or scholar of the day is clear, not only from his title as "leader of the youth of Athens," but also from the fact that Julius Pollux, who held this office under Commodus, had been the tutor of that prince, and has left us an Onomasticon, or lexicon of classical terms, corresponding in effect to the Amara-Cosha of the Indian grammarians. Other rhetoricians or grammarians of the same age drew up glossaries or treatises on grammar and metres, which exhibit a thoroughly philological spirit, and have been found very useful by modern scholars. Among the most eminent of these were Apollonius Dyscolus, who first reduced Greek grammar to something like a systematic form, and his son Herodian, whose writings treated of many departments of minute criticism. We see the influence of the philological studies of the second century in some of the writings of the great satirist Lucian, who was not only an eminent verbal critic, but contrived, by a careful study of the best authors, to pass from the semi-barbarous Hellenism of his native place (Samosata, on the Euphrates) to a style more purely Attic than has ever been attained by an imitator. Philology of the same kind was cultivated by many

other learned Greeks, most of them being, like Lucian, of oriental origin. As scholars, the most eminent of these were the contemporary writers of the third century.—Longinus, who, as we have seen, wrote a book called The Philologists; Porphyry, who was called "the most grammatical of philosophers" (Wytenb. ad Eunap., p. 7, ed. Boissonade); and Origen, the Christian father, who may be said to have founded the modern school of sacred hermeneutics. A taste for philological investigation was exhibited by many writers in the fourth and fifth centuries; and Athens, Alexandria, and Constantinople abounded in philosophers and rhetoricians, both Christian and pagan, who made the illustration of the classical authors one of the main objects of their labours. Such were Themistius and Libanius, Synesius, Theon and his daughter Hypatia, Olympiodorus and Simplicius, and, above all, Proclus, the last of the Neo-Platonists. Orus and Orion wrote on the details of the language; Stephanus of Byzantium collected the traditions of geographical knowledge; and perhaps at this time John of Stobi preserved, by a series of extracts, some records of the ancient philosophical systems.

The middle, or, as they are sometimes called, the dark ages, may be said to have commenced with two nearly contemporaneous events in the eastern and western divisions of the Roman empire. In 529 A.D. the school at Athens was closed by Justinian, and the living literature of Greece received a blow from which it never entirely recovered. Heathen philosophy took refuge for a while in the uncongenial hospitality of Persia; and the intermitting patronage of the Byzantine emperors never gave it an opportunity of really reviving in the regions where the Greek language was still vernacular. In 524 A.D. Boethius died in prison; and his Consolation of Philosophy was the last dying swan-note of classical culture in the districts where the Latin language was still spoken and written according to the forms of the better ages. For some nine centuries after these events, philological studies were prosecuted, if at all, in a very partial and imperfect manner. According to the definition of the term from which we have started, there was no true philology in the dark ages. For though something was done for the illustration of the ancient writers, and something more for their preservation, the classical languages were not viewed with any proper regard to their structure and significance, and the higher kind of verbal criticism was simply non-existent. As far as philology existed at all during these nine centuries, it may be said to have presented itself under four distinct forms of activity, —that which appeared in the general cultivation of Greek literature at Constantinople; that which was represented by the biblical studies of the Jews, especially at Tiberias in Palestine, and at Babylon; that which manifested itself in the intelligent curiosity of Arabic scholars at the two extremities of the Mohammedan conquests, —Baghdad and Seville; and that which is implied in the scholastic learning of Northern and Western Europe.

At Constantinople, in the long interval between the reigns of Justinian and Constantine Palaeologus, the cultivation of Greek literature went through many phases of neglect and revival. And from the time of Photius the Patriarch, in the latter half of the ninth century, down to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when wandering Greeks appeared as the teachers of their own language in Italy and other parts of Europe, Byzantine literature contained some strong ingredients of a philological nature. Lexicons, like the well-known compilations known by the

¹ See Gorresio's Preface to his edition of the Rāmāyana. Lassen thinks that there were three recensions, all amplifications of a common nucleus. (Ind. Alterthumsk. II., p. 500.)

Philology during the Middle Ages. names of Hesychius and Suidas, or by the title of Etymologicum Magnum; commentaries, like those of Eustathius on Homer; treatises on grammar and dialects, like those of Thomas Magister, Georgius Lecapenus, and Gregory of Corinth, at least furnished the materials for those who, a little later, and in a different part of Europe, were destined to bring a more accurate and searching criticism to the same department of study.

1. Philology among the Jews. The attention which the Jews had paid to the texts of their sacred books from the time of their restoration, and especially after they had come into contact with the Greek learning of Alexandria, was in the strictest sense philological; though, from their one-sidedness and natural prejudice, they were not likely to bring any comprehensive or philosophical views to bear on the study of their own language and literature. The Masora or traditional school, which dates from the days of Ezra, continued to exist in Palestine for many centuries. Even after the destruction of Jerusalem it had its seats of learning at Jabneh, Tsiphoriah, Cæsarea and Tiberias. In the last of these places the Rabbi Jehudah was famous about A.D. 230; and after his death Babylon became the chief abode of Jewish learning, having been in fact the birthplace of the studies which Ezra and Nehemiah had imported into their native land, and having been the second home of the Israelites from the time of their exile under Nebuchadnezzar. (See Fuerst, Kultur und Literaturgeschichte der Juden in Asien, i., p. 3.) In the time before this establishment of Jewish learning in Babylon as its metropolis, three epochs are distinguished,—that from 585 to 300 B.C., when the canon was in the process of formation; that from 300 to 32 B.C., when tradition and Jewish theology were establishing themselves on an independent basis of speculation; and that from 32 B.C. to 188 A.D., when the Mishna was in the process of formation. But although Babylon became the chief seat of Jewish learning after the death of the Rabbi Jehudah, the school of Tiberias still retained its authority; and it was here, in A.D. 506, that the Masora of the law was first committed to writing, its last compiler and editor being Ben Asher, who lived at a somewhat later period. The school of Babylon flourished till the year 1037 A.D., and from this proceeded the thriving branches of Jewish literature which were transplanted to Italy, Barbary, and Spain about the year 900 A.D. These learned Jews not only devised an elaborate system of grammar, which still holds its ground, to the great detriment of comparative philology, but they endeavoured to fix the pronunciation of the sacred language by a system of vowel-points, which came into use between the sixth and eighth centuries A.D.; and while they seem to have dealt rather arbitrarily with the text itself, they sought to fix its interpretation by an elaborate contrivance of points and accents.

2. Arabic learning. While the Jews, though denationalized and dispersed in foreign lands, were exhibiting this activity in the philological study of their sacred literature, another branch of the Semitic family had succeeded in carrying their living language from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. The establishment of the religion of Mahomet, and the proselytizing conquests of his successors, had made Arabic the court language in more than one populous and civilized region; and it was the policy of the khalis to encourage the cultivation of a native literature among their subjects. It was under the Abbassidae, and especially under Haroun-al-Rashid, in A.D. 786–808, that this Alexandrian period of Arabic learning attained its greatest lustre. Translations were made from Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Pehlevi writings; and this love of foreign learning was carried so far by Al-Mamun, who reigned in 813–833, that he offered the Byzantine emperor a large sum of money and favourable terms of peace for the services of Leo the philosopher. Under this khali schools were established at Baghdad, Bosra,

Bokhara, and Kufa, and great libraries collected at the capital and in other places. The Moorish dynasty of the Omayids in Spain vied in this patronage of learning with the Abbassidae at Baghdad; and Cordova became one of the chief seats of Arabic culture, especially in the tenth century. Besides Cordova, Spain possessed 14 universities and many lower schools in which Arabic studies were prosecuted; and the influence of these Semitic teachers on the education of Europe in general is shown by the universal substitution of the Arabic for the Roman numerical signs, and by the adoption from the Arabic of a great many technical terms, such as alcohol, algebra, alkali, azimuth, zenith, nadir, &c. The extent to which these Arabic scholars studied the classical writings of the ancients, at a time when they were almost unknown in Europe, is indicated by the importance attached, on the revival of letters, to the translations and commentaries on Aristotle published by Averroes (Ibn-Roschd) of Cordova in the twelfth century, and rendered into Latin for the benefit of the European schoolmen.

In Northern and Western Europe the clergy for a long time monopolized the little learning which still struggled for existence. The prejudice which the church had entertained against heathen culture from the fourth century, prevented the priests themselves from engaging with much interest in the study of the best writers. Greek was an unknown tongue to the Latin Christians; and the language of Cicero and Virgil was gradually breaking up into the Romance dialects, which are its representatives in Italy, France, and Spain. The Latin was indeed retained as the language of religion and law; and the necessity imposed upon the clergy of studying the vulgar translation of the Scriptures and the standard books of canon law, which were written in the classical idiom, maintained the practice of grammatical training even on the part of those who had no taste for a pure and accurate style. And if the classical writers were not much studied, they were at all events preserved from a wider destruction than has befallen them by the monks of the Benedictine order, whose rules obliged them to read and copy manuscripts, and who exercised this rule not unfrequently on behalf of the best Latin authors. Individual instances occurred in which a desire for better learning was manifested. In England, in particular, an Asiatic Greek, named Theodore, who became primate in 668 A.D., introduced a knowledge of Greek and Latin; and in the following century Bede, and a little later Alcuin, exhibited a respectable amount of philological attainments. The intellectual excitement occasioned by the first Crusade, and the glimpses of eastern civilization and refinement which this pilgrimage of warriors and priests opened to the ruder nations of the West, seem to have led to the development of universities in the twelfth century. It is generally supposed that the university of Paris was the earliest of these institutions; but it was followed speedily by similar establishments in England and Italy. In all these universities the faculty of arts or philosophy was the original department; and of the seven liberal arts of which the course of study consisted, the first three, or grammar, logic, and rhetoric, attracted the greatest attention. And as all these consist more or less in the study of language for its own sake, it may be said with truth that the universities of Western Europe had at once grappled with no inconsiderable part of philology. Almost contemporary with this beginning of university education was the establishment of the scholastic philosophy; that is, of a system of grammar and logic derived ultimately from the Stoics, and applied to the solution of the most difficult questions in metaphysics and theology. The founder of this school-philosophy was Roscelin of Compiègne, who flourished in the early part of the twelfth century, and adopted the tenets generally known as nominalism. He was, therefore, the first to inaugurate a

Classical mode of dealing with language, which in the fourteenth and Sacred century, under the able guidance of our countryman, William of Ockham, was destined to pave the way at once for a reformation of theology, and a revival of literary criticism. The schoolmen, however, dealt only with the method of language, or with the structure of the sentence; and though they occasionally speculated on the meaning of terms, they had no linguistic knowledge; and if the universities had been left to the training which they encouraged and exemplified, there would have been no restoration of the better kind of learning. But while they were wrangling on questions of divinity at Paris, Oxford, and Salamanca, and while Bologna was prosecuting the study of the civil law, eminent literary men in Tuscany had been led by their own good taste to make themselves acquainted with the great writers of ancient Greece and Rome, and to acquire the classical idioms in which they had composed their works. Dante, who wrote his Divina Commedia at the very beginning of the fourteenth century, takes Virgil for his guide through the gloomy regions of future punishment, admitting that he had derived all the graces of his style from a careful study of that great poet. Petrarch was induced to devote his special attention to Virgil and Cicero, and recommended them by his warm eulogiums to the notice of his contemporaries. But the traditions of classical Latin had never been entirely lost; and Petrarch aimed at a more important acquisition when he endeavoured, with the aid of the Calabrian Barlaam, to gain some knowledge of Greek in 1342. In this effort he was not successful; but the achievement was effected by Boccaccio a few years later, when he was fortunate enough to obtain the assistance of Leontius Pilatus, the last of those who, in Greece itself, were supposed to understand the text of Homer. These, however, were isolated instances; and no public teacher of Greek was established in Italy before the year 1395, when Emmanuel Chrysoloras gave lectures at Florence, and became the founder of a school of Italian Hellenists. Guarini of Verona had been his pupil at Constantinople, and became his fellow-labourer in spreading a knowledge of Greek. Numerous manuscripts of the best authors were imported by Aurispa and others; and nothing was wanted but formal and public patronage to establish in Italy the renewed study of classical antiquity. The accordance of that patronage in the fifteenth century, combined with the invention of printing in Germany or the Netherlands, and other concurrent causes, gave rise to the revival of learning in Europe, and led to the foundation of modern philology as a main ingredient in liberal education.

III.—CLASSICAL AND SACRED PHILOLOGY AFTER THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE.

Patronage of ancient learning in the 15th century.

It was about the same period that printed books began to appear in the Low Countries and in Germany that the conquests of the Turks drove the most learned Greeks from their own country, and obliged them to seek an asylum in Italy; and that Alfonso, King of Naples, the Pope Eugenius IV., and, above all, Cosimo de' Medici, encouraged learning by a direct countenance of its professors. While the first of these contemporary circumstances paved the way for a general circulation of books, the active patronage of the leading men in Italy enabled native or foreign scholars, like Poggio Bracciolini, Laurentius Valla, Theodore Gaza, John Bessarion, Filelfo, Gemistus Pletho, and others, to place the study of the classical writers on a footing of recognised importance. In tracing briefly the history and development of philological studies from this period, which was not only in one sense a revival of what had previously existed among the Greeks and Romans, but also, in another sense, the beginning of critical scholarship and linguistic science in the modern acceptance of these terms, it will be most convenient to consider separately and in succession the

different countries which made important contributions to Classical the methodical investigation of the classical languages in and Sacred the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Philology.

We must begin with Italy, which, while it may claim the honour of inaugurating modern learning, has perhaps contributed less than any other country in Europe towards the improvement of scientific philology. At the time of their greatest activity, namely, in the first hundred years after the revival of letters, the Italian scholars were chiefly occupied with printing Greek and Latin books, and furnishing the former with Latin versions. An eager desire to know the contents of the books written in Greek, which so few had adequately mastered, made the work of translator very popular and remunerative. Poliziano's version of Herodian passed through three editions in 1493, the year of its publication; and the versions of Plato and Plotinus, which Marsilius Ficinus executed from the Greek manuscripts, were for a long time the only sources of knowledge for those who studied the Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophy. Laurentius Valla, who had begun at an earlier period to translate the historians and epic poets, was the first of these Italian scholars who attempted to deal philologically with the Latin language. His six books on the elegancies of Latin, which were first published before the invention of printing, laid the foundation of modern researches in syntax and the distinctions of synonyms. And he also set the first example of writing critical notes on the text of the New Testament. The first specimen of more general criticism was supplied by the Miscellanies of Poliziano, which appeared in 1489, and contained illustrations of one hundred passages, taken at random from the best Latin authors. He entered into questions sometimes involving the minutest accuracy. For example, he was the first to prove what all scholars admit, though few adopt that spelling, that the name of Virgil was really Vergilius. With all this, however, the book contains at the end the following curious admission and demonstration of the author's disregard of orthography:—"Impressit ex archetypo Antonius Miscominus. Familiares quidam Politiani recognovere. Politianus ipse nec Horthographiam se ait nec omnino alienam præstare culpam." In the same year with the Miscellanies of Poliziano appeared the Cornucopia of Nicolas Perotti, which was mainly a commentary on Martial; and the same scholar compiled a Latin Grammar, which was used as a text-book by the learners of that age. Philippo Beroaldo did good service as an editor of Latin works; and Hermolaus Barbarus, a noble Venetian, who enjoyed a reputation not inferior to that of Poliziano, boasted that he had introduced some 5000 emendations into the text of Pliny's Historia Naturalis. Meanwhile the press of Aldus was in full activity, and before the end of the fifteenth century it had put forth nearly twenty editions of Greek authors, beginning with the elegant but comparatively recent poem of Musæus. The Greek text of Plato, whose writings had excited so much attention at Florence, where they were known in the Latin translation of Ficinus, appeared for the first time from the press of Aldus in 1513, under the editorship of Musæus, who prefixed some Greek elegiac verses of his own, perhaps the last specimen of such a composition from the pen of a native Greek.

The heavy ecclesiastical atmosphere, which hung over Germany, did not allow that country to see the full development of the scholarship which it had inaugurated. It was reserved to Germany and the Netherlands, which had introduced the art of printing, to produce also the first beginnings of a free and enlightened criticism, which rescued classicalism from the trammels of sacerdotalism, and paved the way for intellectual liberty in all departments of literature. The founder of modern scholarship in Germany, and the pioneer of the Reformation, which sprung, in part at least, from the establishment of a better kind of learning in

Classical and Sacred Philology. that country, was John Reuchlin, whose name, according to the pedantic fashion of the age, was Grecized into Capnio. Born at Pforzheim in 1455, and having received his early education in Germany, he was enabled to extend his opportunities of acquiring knowledge by visits to France and Italy; and while in the latter country in the suite of Eberhard of Württemberg, he excited the admiration of Joannes Argyropulus by the accuracy with which he translated Thucydides, and elicited the exclamation that the banished learning of Greece had taken refuge beyond the Alps. His studies were not confined to Greek and Latin. He was also an oriental scholar, and had paid particular attention to the later Hebrew literature. His mantle descended to Melanchthon, whom he recommended as his substitute when invited to Wittenberg; and he died in 1522, after having laid the foundation of the philology which has become the inalienable inheritance of his country.

Melanchthon. In the Low Countries, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was born in 1467, and died in 1536, pursued a course which tended to the same object as that of Reuchlin, though he was less frank and open in the avowal of his convictions. He, too, had visited Italy, and became a doctor at Bologna. And he had made his appearance in England before the end of the fifteenth century, and not only stimulated the learned activity which was commencing in this country, but actually held a professorship in the university of Cambridge, and wrote a book on Latin style for the use of his friend Dean Colet's newly-founded school of St Paul's.

Scholarship in the Netherlands—Erasmus. Although the greatest normal influence is thus attributable to Germany and Holland, it was in France that the earliest philological works of the new school made their appearance. William Budé (Budaus), who was born in the same year as Erasmus, by the publication of his two great works, De Asse et Partibus Ejus in 1514, and his Commentarii Linguae Graecae in 1519, opened a new era in philological research. The latter, in particular, must be regarded as the foundation of all modern Greek lexicography; and though the first book of its kind, it is still an excellent authority in some of its departments, especially in the explanation of the orators; inasmuch that Porson, the greatest critical scholar of the present century, at one time contemplated a republication of the work. We owe to Frenchmen of the sixteenth century not only this, the earliest specimen of a really scholarly explanation of Greek words, but also the first beginnings of Latin and Greek lexicography in the ordinary acceptance of the term. The Dictionaries of Calepio and others were completely superseded by the appearance of the Robert and Latin Thesaurus of Robert Stephens (Etienne) in 1535; Henry Ste. and Henry, the son and successor of that eminent scholar and printer, by the publication of his complete Greek Thesaurus in 1572, not only took the place of the Lexicon published ten years previously by his countryman Robert Constantini, but has furnished the groundwork of all future labours of the same kind; and his great Dictionary has been republished twice in the present century, with all the aids and appliances of modern erudition. Besides these eminent men, and the two greatest scholars of the end of the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth centuries, Isaac Casaubon, the son-in-law of Henry Stephens, and Joseph Justus Scaliger, the founder of philology in Leyden, when the university was established there in 1575, as a reward for the heroic valour of the citizens, France contributed to Italy, in the fifteenth century, the most learned of those who wrote on philology in that country,—M. A. Muretus, who, to considerable erudition and critical acumen, added the rare accomplishment of writing Latin in a style which any Roman but Cicero might have envied.

Muretus. The scholarship of England in the sixteenth century was not only stimulated by the direct influence of foreigners established in the country as teachers, such as Erasmus, P. Martyn, and M. Bucer, and by the intercourse between the leaders of the Reformation on this side of the Channel, and men like Melanchthon, who represented at once the revived learning and Protestant feelings of Northern Germany, but also by the labours of Englishmen high in the state—such as Sir T. Smith, who taught Greek at Cambridge in 1533, and was ultimately secretary of state to Queen Elizabeth; Sir John Chekes, who, after being regius professor of Greek and public orator in the university of Cambridge, was tutor, privy councillor, and secretary of state to Edward VI.; and Roger Ascham, who was private tutor and Latin secretary to Queen Elizabeth. The foundation of a number of grammar schools in the latter half of the sixteenth century did a great deal towards confirming the study of philology as the chief branch of a liberal education; and not only the clergy and gentry, but even the ladies of England, attained to a familiarity with Greek and Latin literature which was not common on the Continent. Grammars of both languages were compiled; and in a series of editions, beginning from the year 1548, Thomas Cooper, afterwards bishop of Lincoln and Winchester, so improved Sir T. Elyot's Latin and English Dictionary, that classical students in this country possessed, with explanations in their own mother tongue, a very adequate substitute for the Thesaurus of Robert Stephens.

Classical and Sacred Philology. By the end of the sixteenth century, classical philology, in its modern sense, was fully established, and the publication of various editions of the New Testament, an active study of Hebrew, especially in Germany and England, and various contributions to the interpretation of Scripture, had placed sacred philology on a parallel footing in the countries which professed Protestantism. Even the remote kingdom of Scotland had felt the influence of this revived study of antiquity; and George Buchanan, who was born in 1506, and died in 1582, obtained a place, at any rate in Latin scholarship, equal to that of his most celebrated contemporaries.—Οὐ Σέβρος ἦν, said his pedantic eulogist, ἀλλὰ φάος Σαββίης. After the commencement of the seventeenth century, it is no longer necessary to consider the progress of philology with reference to the different countries which contributed to it. The republic of letters was of no country; and while scholars formed a sort of confraternity which kept up a friendly intercourse by means of Latin, the universal language, sometimes publishing in one country what had been written in another, the successive epochs in the development of linguistic science were due rather to the eminent talents of individuals than to anything peculiar to the training or circumstances of their respective nations.

Classical learning in England. As we have already intimated, two great French scholars form the link between the creative efforts of the sixteenth and the completed scholarship of the seventeenth century: Isaac Casaubon, who was born at Geneva, where his parents Isaac Casaubon had taken refuge in 1559, and who died as prebendary of Westminster and Canterbury in 1614, being as nearly as possible the contemporary of Shakespeare; and Joseph J. J. Scaliger, who was born at Agen in 1540, and died at Leyden in 1609. The latter of these celebrated men constitutes an epoch in the history of philology; and, encouraged as he was by the communications of Casaubon, he laid the foundation of the science of learned chronology. "Scaliger," says Niebuhr (Hist. of Rome, i., note 660), "stood at the summit of universal solid philological learning in a degree that no one has reached since; and so high in every branch of science, that from the resources of his own mind he could comprehend, apply, and decide on whatever came in his way." It was not only by his great work De Emendatione Temporum, and his numerous contributions to the elucidation and criticism of the ancient authors (see the list given by J. Bernays in his biography of Scaliger), but also by his great work De Emendatione Temporum, and his numerous contributions to the elucidation and criticism of the ancient authors (see the list given by J. Bernays in his biography of Scaliger).

abbey, and a house of refuge. Earthenware is made here; and fishing is carried on. Pop. 6000.

PAU, a town of France, capital of the department of Lower Pyrenees, stands on a ridge of hills on the right bank of the Gave de Pau, 58 miles E.S.E. of Bayonne, and 468 S.W. of Paris. Its situation is very beautiful, as the river has its banks lined with trees, and is crossed by a picturesque bridge; while the view to the south is extremely fine, commanding the bold and serrated range of the Pyrenees, appearing in the distance between the gaps in the rounded and wooded hills that rise in front. The town is well and regularly built, having one principal street, several squares, and public walks. The Place Royale, near the centre, is planted with trees, and contains a statue of Henri IV.; the Place de la Comédie is also a fine square; but the most beautiful public place is the Parc, a natural terrace shaded with fine trees, which extends along the bank of the Gave de Pau. The most remarkable building in the town is the castle, a large irregular structure with five towers, standing at the west end, overlooking the river. This castle is interesting on account of its historical associations; for Henri IV. was born here, and his cradle, consisting of a large tortoise-shell, is still preserved. The castle was much injured during the first revolution, when it was used for barracks; but it was handsomely restored by Louis Philippe, and was for some time the residence of Abd-el-Kader. There are in Pau, Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, courts of law, a college, museum, public library, literary society, and market-house. The manufactures consist of handkerchiefs, table linen, carpets, rags, leather, and paper. A considerable trade is carried on in wine, chestnuts, hams, salt meat, cotton and woollen goods, &c. Pau is a favourite residence of the English, especially in winter, on account of the mildness and dryness of the climate. It is also much resorted to by the Parisians. Bernadotte, the King of Sweden, as well as Henri IV., was born here. Pop. (1856) 17,238.

PAUL, originally SAUL, an apostle of Jesus Christ, and author of several portions of the New Testament canon. Though a native of Tarsus, a city of Cilicia,¹ he was the son of Jewish parents belonging to the tribe of Benjamin.² From his father he inherited the rights of Roman citizenship,³ which had probably been conferred upon some of his ancestors for some important services rendered to the commonwealth;⁴ and it has been conjectured, though with no great probability, that the cloak and parchments which he so earnestly charged Timothy to bring with him to Rome were the Roman toga and the certificates of his citizenship, which he expected might be of use to him in his anticipated trial before the emperor. The name Saul (שָׁאוֹל), which he received at his birth, and which signifies "the longed-for, the desired," would seem to indicate that he was the first-born son of his parents, and that his birth was viewed by them as an answer to prayers; that he was not, however, their only child, is apparent from Acts xxiii. 16, where mention is made of his "sister's son." In the 16th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans he himself names six persons whom he styles his συγγενείς; but it has been questioned whether by that term he intends more than fel-low-countrymen, though the probability is, he uses it in its proper sense of relations.⁵ The name Saul (שָׁאוֹל) was afterwards dropped, and that of Paul (Παῦλος) constantly used

both by himself and others. Much difference of opinion exists as to the relation of these names to each other, and the reason why the one was dropped and the other retained. Some think that, as Luke mentions the name Paul for the first time in connection with the apostle's interview with Sergius Paulus (Acts xiii. 9), the apostle assumed that name out of courtesy to the proconsul; an opinion which, though suggested by Jerome, and adopted by Bengel, Olshausen, Meyer, and Baumgarten, does not in itself seem very probable, and is hardly in keeping with the form of Luke's statement, "Saul, who is also Paul." Others with greater probability suppose that the apostle had originally a double name, the one Hebrew and the other Latin; and that when he came to labour chiefly among the Gentiles, he dropped the former and used only the latter. So Alting, Lightfoot, Hammond, Wolf, Basnage, Schrader, Winer, De Wette, and others. In the judgment of many distinguished scholars, however, the most probable conjecture is, that the name Paulus is only a softened form of the Hebrew, Shaul, to accommodate it to western organs, just as we find Jason for Jesus, Hierosolyma for Yerushalayim, Matthæus for Mattiyah, Alphæus for Chalpai, and many others; though it must be confessed that none of these is exactly parallel to the case before us.

His father being of the sect of the Pharisees, probably devoted him from his infancy to the service of religion; and with this view Paul seems to have received such education as appeared most calculated to fit him for the duties to which he was destined. At that time Tarsus was eminently distinguished for its cultivators of philosophy, and every other department in the circle of instruction (σπουδὴ πρὸς τὴν φιλοσοφίαν καὶ τὴν ἄλλην ἐγκύκλιον ἀπασαν πρὸς τὰς ἀποστολὰς);⁶ but to what extent the future apostle of Christianity was indebted to the labours of such teachers for his early education no means are left us of judging. It is probable that his obligations were not very great; for as his ultimate destination was to the office of an expounder of the Jewish law and traditions, it does not appear likely that he would be sent by his parents to occupy himself with the literature and philosophy of those whom the Jews despised as outcasts, as well from the light as from the favour of heaven. At the same time it cannot be denied that his residence in a city where the study of the liberal sciences was so assiduously and successfully prosecuted as to place it upon a par with "Athens, Alexandria, or any other place that could be named in which schools and studies are to be found,"⁷ must have had a considerable influence in refining his taste and liberalizing and expanding his views; and he would doubtless here also obtain a familiarity with Greek as a spoken language which could not but be of use to him in after-life. It was at Jerusalem, however, the centre of the Jewish world, that the most important part of his education was received. At an early age, in his twelfth or fourteenth year, as is supposed,⁸ he was brought to this city, and placed under the instruction of Gamaliel, one of the most famous teachers of Jewish learning at that time.⁹ Here he finished his education as a Pharisee, and at the same time, according to the custom of the Jews, acquired a mechanical art, that of a σκηνοποιός, which some render "a mechanist;" others "a haircloth-maker;" others "a maker of tapestry or carpeting;" and others, with most apparent propriety, as in our version, "a tentmaker, or a maker of tent-cloth."¹⁰ By this he probably supported himself during

¹ Acts xxii. 3, &c.

² Phillip. iii. 5.

³ Acts xxii. 25-28.

⁴ The opinion, that the natives of Tarsus enjoyed the juris civitatis as a birthright, is not supported by evidence. The fact of that city's having been created by Augustus an urbs libera (Plin. v. 27) does not lead to any conclusion as to the possession by its natives of the right of Roman citizenship; and, from Acts xxi. 39, compared with xxi. 24, 27, it may be inferred, that as the chief captain knew Paul to be a native of Tarsus, and yet was ignorant of his Roman citizenship, these two were not necessarily conjoined.

⁵ So Lardner, Meyer, Fritzsche (who says, "explicitio popularis mos absurda est"), De Wette, &c.

⁶ Strabo, lib. xiv., c. v.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Greswell's Dissertations, vol. i., p. 554.

⁹ Acts xxii. 3.

¹⁰ Michaels, Intro. by Marsh; Hamelstein, Einführung, ch. iii., s. 301.

¹¹ Eichhorn, Einzels. iii. 9; Hug, Einzels. ii. 213.

¹² "Persons travelling in the East, in order to shelter themselves from the rain and noxious blasts during the night, carry with them small tents made of leather or cloth; and the manufacture of these is a profitable occupation." (Winer, Bib. Realwörterbuch, art. Paulus.

Classical grammar and criticism opposed to the mere empiricism and Sacred which had previously been considered sufficient for all practical purposes. The chief works of Reiz were his treatise De Temporibus et Modis Verbi Græci et Latini (Leips. 1766), and his essay De Prosodia Græca Accentus Inclinatione (published after his death, by F. A. Wolf); but whatever influence he may have produced on the learned world by these treatises, a more important effect resulted from his training of the mind of Godfrey Hermann (born 28th November 1772, died on the last day of 1848). The first edition of Buttman's Greek Grammar had been published in 1782, but without evincing any of the marked features of the work as we now have it. In 1801 appeared Hermann's Essay De Emendanda Ratione Græce Grammaticæ, which took a truly philosophical view of the subject, and applied to the traditional system of the Greeks principles derived from the general theory of language. The historical criticism, which had been founded by Bentley, and to which Heyne had made some approximations, was revived in a very striking manner by a pupil of the latter, Fr. Augustus Wolf, who, following up a theory which had been ventilated in 1725 by an eccentric Italian, Giambattista Vico, perhaps also acting on the hints thrown out by Wood in 1772 (On the Original Genius of Homer), and certainly guided in some degree by the Venetian Scholia published by Villoison in 1788, undertook to prove in 1795 that the poems attributed to Homer were not the work of one poet, but were collections of lays reduced to an outward coherence and consistency by the editorial labours, first of the Pisistratidæ at Athens, and afterwards of the Alexandrian grammarians; that, in fact, they were not originally committed to writing, but had gradually assumed in the hands of the rhapsodists the form in which they were thus submitted to the diligence of successive remodellers. Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum, supplemented in 1797 by his Briefe an Hrn. Hofrath Heyne, eine Beilage zu den neuesten Untersuchungen über Homer, produced an effect not unlike that of Bentley's Dissertation on Phalaris; and though his views have not found more than a partial acceptance in his own country, and have been warmly combatted by some of the best scholars in England, Wolf is accepted, by the chief promoters of historical criticism in the present century, as their great model and immediate forerunner. This was directly admitted by Barthold Niebuhr (born at Copenhagen 26th August 1776, died at Bonn 2d January 1831), whose History of Rome is the most remarkable example of destructive and reconstructive criticism that modern philology has produced. The study of the classical writers in that connection with the taste of modern literature which the old pedantic scholars (Ruhnken's Doctores Umbratici) had formally repudiated, and which Heyne had done so much to establish,¹ found a great supporter in Fr. Schleiermacher, an eminent philosopher and divine, who applied to his examination of Plato's Dialogues a system of interpretation resting on a comprehensive view of the connection of thought in the collected works of his author; and his method was avowedly adopted by Augustus Böckh and Ludolf Dessen. Perhaps the summit of excellence in this application of classical philology was attained by Karl Otfried Müller, the favourite pupil of Böckh, who pursued with success the path opened by Heyne, Böckh, Niebuhr, and Winckelmann, and brought his own genial spirit to the aid of his multifarious researches in fields already occupied by other labourers. Views of mythology not confined to the old limits of classical erudition were put forth by Lobeck and Creuzer; and when Niebuhr's discovery of the manuscript of Gaius had given a new impulse to the study of civil law, Savigny and

others improved the occasion with such zeal that, in Germany at least, there is a complete union between classical philology and jurisprudence.

The full effects of this new school of German philology were not felt in England until after the general pacification of Europe in 1815. From that time to the present we have gradually extended our acquaintance with the labours of our contemporaries on the Continent; and it may now be said that, according to the definition of those terms on which we have elsewhere insisted (Classical Scholarship and Classical Learning, Cambridge, 1856, pp. 149, seqq.), philological students in this country have adequately combined the learning which is the special characteristic of German classicalism, with the scholarship which has been hitherto regarded as the most solid basis of a liberal education in England. The great problem has been, to harmonize the practical skill, the finished mastery over the resources of the Greek and Latin languages, which the habit of composition in prose and verse, in our great schools and older universities, has produced, perhaps in superabundant measure, and in which the Germans are conspicuously deficient, with a more general possession of that knowledge of facts and books, that comprehensive erudition, which the numerous philological professors scattered over Germany are generally found to possess. That such a combination is possible,—that it is sometimes effected in a most remarkable manner,—will not be denied by any one who is aware that the financial affairs of this great commercial country have been administered in succession by two statesmen of nearly the same age, both educated with singular distinction at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford; and that, while one of these has, among other learned works, produced the most profound and critical treatise on the early history of Rome that has appeared since Niebuhr, the other has submitted to an elaborate review, only too much diversified by the flights of an enthusiastic imagination, the various questions connected with the philological analysis of the Homeric poems. We refer of course to Sir G. C. Lewis and Mr W. E. Gladstone.

Rather more than four centuries have elapsed since the Complete revival of literature, and the commencement of a period when modern scholars proposed to themselves the task of recovering philologically the knowledge of the classical languages which had been lost in Italy and Greece. It is now a long time since the more accomplished scholars of the northern universities have been qualified to expound Thucydides at Athens, and to explain Virgil at Rome; since they could write Greek iambic verse with a correctness not attainable by Gregory of Nazianzus, and could translate their vernacular poetry into Latin elegiacs which Claudian might have acknowledged as equal to his own best efforts. And especially during the last forty years the principles of philological science have attained to such fixedness and maturity, that it does not seem very probable that any very important modifications will be introduced into the method of study which has been established in Germany and England. We cannot therefore conclude the brief survey which we have taken of the history of classical and sacred philology since the middle of the fifteenth century without stating the results which have been secured, and the resources which have been collected for the use of philologists of the present and future ages.

The domain of classical and sacred philology has been Departmented out, with various degrees of minute detail and refined subdivision, by the most recent writers on the subject (see especially F. A. Wolf, Vorlesung über die Encyclopädie der Alterthumswissenschaft, published by Gurtler, Leipsic, 1831; G. Bernhardy, Grundlinien zur Encyclopädie der

¹ Compare what Ruhnken says (De Doctore Umbratico, p. 120), with the admission of Böckh (Orat. A. 1826, halita), "qui non videam homines Græcam Latinamque grammaticam imprimis tenentes ceteris mortalibus animo bene conformato longe præstare."

Classical Philologie, Halle, 1832; A. Matthiä, Encyklopädie und Sacred Methodologie der Philologie, Leipzig, 1855; Haase, art. Philology. "Philologie," in Ersch and Gruber's Allgemeine Encyclopädie, part 33, Leipzig, 1847, pp. 392, seqq.) It does not appear necessary, at least for our present purpose, that we should go beyond the simple and general classification suggested by Böckh,—namely, that philology falls into two great masses, the formal and the material, or the doctrine of words (verbal philology), and the knowledge of things (real philology). To the first (I.) belong exegesis and criticism, including (a) grammar, (b) lexicography, and (c) the constitution and interpretation of the classical and sacred texts; to the second (II.) belong (a) political history, with chronology and geography, (b) public and private antiquities, (c) mythology and the archaeology of art, and (d) the history of ancient literature and science. In all these departments the labours of the last four hundred years, and especially the methodical efforts of the last half century, have made such progress that it is not reasonable to expect from those who come after us much more than a gradual improvement in the details.

I. (a.) Grammars.

I. (a.) The grammars of the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew languages have been subjected to the most searching and accurate scrutiny; and both the origin of the word-forms and the structure of the sentences have been expounded according to principles of scientific criticism altogether beyond the reach of Apollonius, Priscian, or the Jewish rabbis. The author of these pages is of course prevented from speaking of what he has attempted to do for the improvement of Greek and Latin grammar; but it is right to mention, as works which have produced a marked influence on the classical scholarship of the present century, the contributions of Buttmann and Lobeck to the establishment of an accurate acquaintance with the forms of words (Formenlehre) in the Greek language, and the exposition of Greek syntax by Buttmann, Matthiä, Madvig, and Rost; the metrical researches of Porson, Gaisford, Hermann, and Böckh, have left little to be desired in that department; K. L. Schneider's collections of the forms and inflexions of Latin words exhaust the subject as far as he has gone; and the numerous editions of Zumpt's Latin Grammar, combined with the independent researches of Madvig, have given a lucid and accurate view of Latin syntax. The improvement of Hebrew grammar, and of that of the Aramean and cognate dialects, is due to Gesenius, Ewald, Fuerst, and Hoffmann.

I. (b.) Lexicography.

I. (b.) The department of lexicography attained to a complete and lasting development much earlier than that of grammar. We have already mentioned that the great French printers of the sixteenth century, Robert Stephens and his son Henry, drew up respectively complete Dictionaries of the Latin and Greek languages. The Greek Thesaurus of Henry Stephens, which was arranged, as far as the knowledge of those days allowed, in etymological order, was reproduced in the same form, but with very copious additions, by the English printer A. J. Valpy (London 1816-26); and a new edition, with the words arranged alphabetically, has been in the course of publication at Paris since the year 1830, under the conjoint or successive editorship of C. B. Hase, G. B. L. Sinner, T. Fix, L. and W. Dindorf,—all German scholars; and the work, thus remodelled and enlarged, must remain the most copious repertorium of information respecting the facts of the Greek language. A more methodical arrangement of the significations is exhibited in the Greek Lexicons with vernacular interpretations, of which the first specimens were put forth by the German scholar J. G. Schneider, and his editor and abridger F. Passow. After more than one unsuccessful attempt, Greek and English lexicography was placed on a satisfactory footing by Messrs Liddell and Scott of Oxford, whose labours were professedly based on those of Passow. The improvement,

however, of the German Dictionary by its more recent editors, Rost and Palm, will probably give rise to a corresponding effort on the part of English scholars. The Latin Thesaurus of Henry Stephens and its successor, Faber's Lexicon (first published in 1571), assumed their best form under the editorship of J. M. Gesner. But the honour of drawing up a Latin Dictionary which should rank with the Greek Thesaurus of Henry Stephens, was reserved for an Italian scholar, Egidio Forcellini of Padua, who, after forty years' labour expended on his task, published his great work in 1771, in 4 vols. folio. His countryman, Furnaletti, enriched the work with a valuable appendix; and the Lexicon has appeared in the best form which it can be expected to attain in the English edition by Mr Bailey (London, 1826). Some Latin and German Dictionaries, especially that by Scheller, have merits of their own; but although the Lexicon of Forcellini, with all its copiousness, is occasionally imperfect, it will ever remain the greatest monument of honest labour bestowed upon the Latin language. Of Latin and English Lexicons, the best representative of the scholarship of the day is undoubtedly that of Dr W. Smith. With regard to the Hebrew language, the Buxtorfs, Pagninus, and others, had adequately conveyed the traditional interpretation of Hebrew phraseology; but a new era in Hebrew lexicography was opened by the Thesaurus of W. Gesenius, and the elaborate Concordance of Julius Fuerst, and his Dictionary, which is in the course of publication, will leave the student of this language nothing to desire.

I. (c.) The constitution and interpretation of the classical and sacred texts presented the first and most necessary object to the scholars of Europe on the revival of letters; but it has required a long probation in grammatical and metrical criticism to bring this department to its present state of methodical perfection. It can hardly be doubted that the great English scholars have done more than any of their brethren on the Continent to establish the laws of language and metre, and the principles of criticism, which are of constant application in dealing with the texts of authors deformed by the transmitted blunders of ignorant copyists. With regard to the sacred texts, the peculiar feelings with which they are regarded have induced editors to rely as far as possible on manuscript authority, and the most laborious collations have been made with this view. It has been shown, however, that conjectural emendations may be safely introduced into the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, which has often been arbitrarily altered by the Scribes and Talmudists; and Lachmann, one of the most recent, and at the same time most careful editors of the New Testament, has asserted and exemplified the occasional necessity of having recourse to the unaided sagacity of the critic in certain cases of difficulty. (Tom. ii., præf., p. v., seqq.) In the classical authors, and especially in the poets, a scrupulous regard for the manuscripts is seldom entertained by any one who has mastered the details of the Greek and Latin languages, and who knows that he has rarely before him a manuscript authority of older date than the later centuries of Byzantine literature. The obvious errors found in the papyri of the newly-discovered fragments of Hypereides, and even in some inscriptions, show that the most ancient copyists were not more immaculate than modern printers; and the chances of error are infinitely multiplied when we have to deal with the last results of many centuries of transcription. The confidence of the verbal critic in conjectural emendation has often been confirmed by the subsequent discovery that the alteration which he felt to be necessary to the grammar or metre is actually preserved in some older copy, or in some citation from the author by an ancient grammarian. The perfection of modern grammar and lexicography, and the great ability which has been brought to the study of the ancient texts,

Comparative Philology. have left us very few authors, and indeed very few inscriptions or coins, which still require the care of a competent editor.

II. (a.) History, chronology, and geography. English scholarship has placed the results of philological research in their most complete and perhaps final condition. Although the great German writers, especially Niebuhr and O. Müller, have done very much to investigate the early and obscure periods of Roman and Greek history, the classical period of the former is most adequately narrated by Arnold, Liddell, and Merivale; Gibbon will always remain the master-work for the period of the decline and fall; and Sir G. C. Lewis has investigated even the early history in a new spirit of learned scepticism. In regard to Greek history, the labours of Thirlwall and Grote, coming close in succession, have challenged an incontestable superiority to all previous or contemporary labours. The Pasti of the late Mr Clinton are the standard work on chronology. And in geography, the learned investigations of Leake and others are most satisfactorily exhibited in the valuable Dictionary edited by Dr W. Smith.

II. (b.) Antiquities. II. (b.) For the collection of facts illustrative of the public and private life of the ancients we are chiefly indebted to the laborious erudition of the Germans in the present century, among whom Böckh, Becker, Wachsmuth, Schömann, and K. F. Hermann, occupy a distinguished place.

II. (c.) Mythology. II. (c.) In mythology, also, no other scholars can vie with the philologists of Germany. From different points of view, Creuzer, O. Müller, and Lobeck have treated the subject with great acuteness and exhaustive learning. The archaeology of art, since Winckelmann's time, has been prosecuted with eminent success by German scholars. The Archaeological Society of Rome is chiefly sustained by students of this nation; and the late O. Müller's Manual is the best text-book on artistic antiquities.

II. (d.) Literary history. II. (d.) The history of ancient literature is no longer confined to the learned collections of J. A. Fabricius. Not to speak of the valuable articles contained in the Dictionaries of Pauly and W. Smith, in the various Encyclopædias, and in the Prolegomena to elaborate editions of the ancient writers, many books have appeared, or are in the course of publication, which treat elaborately of the history of ancient literature and science. The history of Greek literature, in particular, was undertaken by O. Müller, whose book has been recently completed; and a similar review has been commenced on a much larger scale by Mr Mure, of whose valuable work five volumes have already appeared. Dr Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences contains all that need be said of the progress of physical knowledge in ancient times; and the Kosmos of A. von Humboldt is not less remarkable for the learning with which he has collected the reports of more ancient observers of nature, than for the genial sentiment and graphic power with which he has stated the results of modern investigations.

IV.—COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY.

Distinctions between classical and comparative philology. Up to the beginning of the present century the great fabric of classical and sacred philology, which had received a gradual increase of solidity or dimensions from the contemporary or successive labours of scholars during the preceding 350 years, stood by itself in a sort of solitary magnificence. Since then there has risen by its side a method of linguistic study, which, though it serves in many respects as a most important auxiliary to the older form of philology, and, conversely, derives from classical learning some of its best materials and safest principles, nevertheless presents many features of contrast to its predecessor, and has not yet been able to effect the intimate and cordial alliance which is necessary for the best possible prosecution of both. This is comparative philology, or the compara-

tive study of languages, with an immediate reference to the discovery of the laws which regulate human speech in general, and with an ulterior application to palæological researches respecting the origin of the human race and its various branches, the pre-historical condition, abodes, and civilization of the different tribes of men, and the derivation of those forms of religious belief which seem traceable to some early but not otherwise discoverable contact of nations now geographically distant from one another. The differences between classical and comparative philology seem at first sight sufficiently pronounced. While the student of classical and sacred philology bestows a minute, searching, and critical attention on the grammars of two or three ancient languages, with a professed and special reference to the literature to which they serve as the key; while, if we except the educational results of his grammatical training, we find that the real object of his pursuit is often not so much the words as the things recorded in writing; the comparative philologist, on the other hand, does not confine himself to the classical, or even to the most ancient languages, for every variety of human speech which is fixed in a permanent form furnishes him with inductions for his science, and is alike interesting to him; and he does not concern himself with any literature, whether ancient or modern, except so far as it enables him the better to investigate the structure of language, and so to establish scientifically his views respecting the nature and laws of human speech. Thus, while the classical or sacred philologist studies two or three languages, mainly, or at least professedly, for the sake of their literature, the comparative philologist studies not only all languages, but all literature, for the sake of language in general, and what results from the affinities of particular languages. But though there is this opposition between the two different departments of philology, and though one-sided students in either province have been disposed to regard their fellow-labourers with distrust or superciliousness, philologists of more comprehensive views have recognised the fact, that a prolonged and critical study of some ancient language and literature is the most satisfactory basis for the comparative investigation of all languages with a general object, and that no ancient language and literature can be studied in the best manner by those who ignore the processes and results of comparative philology. And if we speak of a philologist in the fullest and strictest sense of the term, we must not at the present day concede this name to any one who has not ascended from classicalism to comparative grammar, and who cannot extract scientific truth from an examination of the structure and history of language in general.

It has been already intimated that comparative philology did not establish itself as a recognised science until after the commencement of the present century. Indeed, its origin may be dated from the time when Sanscrit grammar began to be studied in a proper manner by European scholars; and if a particular year may be fixed as that of its birth, we could hardly select any other than 1808, that of the death of our great verbal scholar, R. Porson; when the publication of Colebrooke's edition of the Amaracōsha at Serampore, paved the way for a more convenient form of Sanscrit and English lexicography; when Wilkins' Sanscrit Grammar, and the notice of the book in the Edinburgh Review (vol. xiii.), directed the attention of English scholars to the affinities of Sanscrit with the other Indo-Germanic languages; when F. Schlegel's book On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians awakened a similar interest in Germany; and when Prichard's Inaugural Dissertation on the Varieties of the Human Race laid the foundation of the modern science of ethnography. But long before this time, gradual and imperfect approximations had been made to a comparative analysis of ancient languages. The first beginnings were

Comparative Philology. due to the fruitless search among existing languages for the primitive form of human speech; and as various idioms were selected as having the highest claim to this distinction, the affiliation of other languages was attempted by the most violent and precarious etymologies. Sometimes the Celtic, in one case the low Dutch, more frequently the Semitic languages, especially the Hebrew, were favoured with this recognition of priority; but the process was in every case the same, the assumptions equally inadmissible, and the conclusions equally unsatisfactory. The true affinity between Persian, German, and Greek was perceived by Lipsius (in 1599), by Salmasius (in 1643), and by D. Wilkins (in 1715); but as they had no fixed principles of philology, no results flowed from the observation of the facts. The progress of missionary labour led to the translation of the Lord's Prayer into a variety of languages, and a collection of these versions was made by Gesner, whose Mithridates appeared in 1555, and led to the collection by Wilkins and Chamberlayne in 1715, and ultimately to the more extended work by Adelung and Vater. The first, however, who prosecuted the comparative study of language on sound principles, and saw its possible application to ethnography was the illustrious Leibnitz. His comprehensive genius anticipated many of the future results of linguistic science, and it was he who recommended the formation of comparative lists of words designating common objects, which would be a basis for the inductions of the general grammarian. The first elaborate attempt to carry out this recommendation was made by the Jesuit Hervas in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, his various works being published between 1784 and 1787; and about the same time appeared the collections made by the naturalist Pallas, under the direction of the Empress Catherine II. The publication of the first volume of Adelung's Mithridates in 1806, brings us close upon the period which we have indicated as the true birth-tide of comparative philology, and completes the previous epoch of preparatory labours. Before we discuss the rapid progress of comparative grammar subsequently to the year 1806, it will be desirable to notice what had been done before, or was doing at that time, or has been done since then, for the critical study of the three main branches of language which are spoken by the great Christian nations of Europe,—the Romance, the Teutonic, and the Slavonian.

Study of the Romance languages. It might have been expected that the obvious resemblances of the Romance languages, and their known derivation from a common origin, and not from any one of themselves, would have attracted attention at an early period, and led to a recognition on these data of the general principles of comparative philology. For if any scholar had merely written down in parallel columns the substantive verb in the Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Rhotic-Romance, and Wallachian languages, he could not have failed to see that the inflexions were but six variations of a common type; and a very small acquaintance with history would have taught the inquirer that this common type was to be found in the old Latin; so that the Romance languages were all sisters, the daughters of one mother. This conclusion, extended to all the members of the Indo-Germanic family, is the primary result of comparative philology in general. But though scholars to whom these languages were vernacular had, from the time of Dante, noted many peculiarities common to them, and though even the Byzantine Greek, Laonicus Chalcondyles, had remarked in the fifteenth century the affinity of the French and Italian (p. 89, ed. Bonn.), nothing was done for the methodical philology of the Romance languages before the time of Raynouard, who was born in 1761, but did not publish the first volume of his Choix des Poésies Originaires des Troubadours till 1816. His best predecessors—Menage, in the seventeenth, and St Palaye, in the eighteenth century—had only entered on the confines of the subject. But his Grammar and Lexicon, and the

abundant examples which he collected, have placed Romance philology on a scientific footing, and enabled his successors, especially Diez, to deal on the principles of comparative grammar with all the languages which derive their origin from the Latin.

The founder of the comparative philology of the Teutonic languages was an English non-juror, George Hickes, whose Thesaurus Grammatico-Criticus et Archaeologicus Linguarum veterum Septentrionalium, published in 1715, indicated, however imperfectly, the results which might be obtained from an examination of the affinities of the German and Scandinavian languages. He had no doubt derived great advantage from the Mæso-Gothic studies of Francis Junius, a German settled in England, who died in 1677; and the increasing attention which was subsequently paid to the venerable remains of Ulfilas, the Sanscrit of the Teutonic family, and to Anglo-Saxon literature, contributed to pave the way for the establishment of a scientific school of German philology. The application to this work of a comprehensive and original mind is due to Rasmus Christian Rask, a native of Denmark, who commenced in 1807, while still a young man (he was born in 1787), a series of labours which have placed him in the highest class of linguistic discoverers; and it has been well observed (Edinb. Rev., vol. 94, p. 317), that "Rask's works on the classification and comparison of languages are the best specimens of what could be accomplished in comparative philology without the aid of Sanscrit." In the years 1807-1812 he occupied himself with writing Grammars of most of the Germanic, Scandinavian, Slavonian, and Romance languages—making references occasionally to the Indian idioms. In 1812 he travelled to Sweden, and laid the foundation of his knowledge of the Finnish dialects. In 1813 he went to Iceland, where he spent three years; and in 1814 appeared his prize essay On the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language. His perception of the affinities of the German and Asiatic languages led him to undertake, in 1820, an overland journey to Persia and India; and the fruit of his linguistic studies in the East appeared in his essay On the Age of the Zend Language, and the Genuineness of the Zendaresta, published by Hagen in 1826. On his return to his native country in 1823, he engaged in a long series of linguistic labours; and he died in November 1832. For Teutonic philology he did more than any of his predecessors and contemporaries, and may really claim the honour of having first noticed the law of the permutations of consonants, which is generally connected with the name of James Lewis Grimm. This distinguished philologist, born two years before Rask, may be said to have completed the edifice of which that great linguist laid the foundations. His German Grammar (1819-1840) has subjected the whole range of the Teutonic dialects to a comparative analysis, and in the first volume he has established, by a copious induction, to which, however, there are some exceptions not yet fully explained, the laws for the regular interchange of the mutes, which Rask had less completely indicated. His subsequent works, The Legal Antiquities of Germany (1840-1842), his German Mythology (1835-1844), his History of the German Language (1848), and his German Dictionary, now in the course of publication, have brought all the resources of philology to bear on his Teutonic researches. In this department, however, we must not forget to mention the valuable labours of our own countrymen, the late Mr J. M. Kemble, who not only revived J. M. Kemble among us, but prosecuted with eminent success, the study of Anglo-Saxon; Dr R. G. Latham, who, in addition to R. G. Latham's more general labours in comparative philology, has for the first time expounded the principles of English grammar, and investigated the ethnography of the British Islands, in accordance with the results of modern science; and the late Mr Richard Cleasby, who devoted his life, during a R. Cleasby

Comparative Philology. long residence at Copenhagen, to the compilation of a Dictionary of the old Norse or Icelandic language, and whose great posthumous work is about to appear at Oxford, under the competent editorship of Dr G. W. Dasent.

Sclavonic Philology—Dobrowsky. The Sclavonic languages, spoken by a hundred millions of Christians in the east of Europe, have not failed to claim their share in the general interest of philologists. The father of Sclavonic philology was Joseph Dobrowsky, born at Gyermet, near Raab, in 1753. Of his numerous works, in which he penetrated for the first time into the peculiar structure of the Sclavonic idioms, the most important was his Institutiones Linguae Sclavonicae Dialecti Veteris, Vienna, 1822. In the path which he opened Dobrowsky was successfully followed by Paul Joseph Schafarik, who was born at Kobeljarowo in Hungary in 1795, and whose History of the Sclavonic Language and Literature (Osen, 1828) is the classical work on the subject. The great Polish Lexicon of Samuel Gottlieb Linde, born at Thorn in 1771, is a complete treasure-house for the comparison of the Sclavonic languages. It appeared at Warsaw in the years 1807–1814. The Lithuanian, Lettish, and Old Prussian, which have many features in common with the Sclavonic, and have made most important contributions to the materials of comparative grammar, have been habilitated in this domain by C. G. von Arndt (1818), J. S. Vater (1821), and A. F. Pott (1837).

Study of Sanscrit. But these detached labours bestowed on the different languages of Europe would not have produced, even in connection with the old classical philology, the necessary unity of results, if they had not been assisted and guided by the critical and grammatical study of the old language of the Brahmins. The striking resemblance between the Sanscrit, Persian, Greek, and Latin languages had been incidentally noticed by Mr Halhed as early as 1776, when he edited the code of Gentoo laws, and afterwards in 1778, when he published his Bengali Grammar at Hoogly; and Sir William Jones, and the German missionary John Philip Werdin, had—the latter with very slight knowledge of the subject—carried their observations a little further. In order that satisfactory progress should be made, it was necessary that Sanscrit, and the books written in it, should be really known; and for this the world is indebted to the abilities and industry of certain Englishmen, especially Mr Colebrooke, Sir Charles Wilkins, and Professor Horace Hayman Wilson. When this safe foundation had been secured, it was easy to use it in building up the superstructure of comparative philology; and labouring in the same field with Rask and Grimm, who, in one sense, led the way in the new science of comparative philology, Edward Francis Bopp (born in 1791), and Augustus William Schlegel (born in 1767, died in 1845), were the first who applied Sanscrit scholarship, as a branch of European study, to a general analysis of the structure of human speech. In his Conjugations-system der Sanskritsprache (Frankfurt, 1816), which appeared four years afterwards in an English form (Annals of Oriental Literature, Lond. 1820), Bopp gave the first specimen of that elaborate and exact scrutiny of grammatical forms, which has made him the chief authority in all that relates to the comparative philology of the Indo-Germanic languages. The works which contain his linguistic discoveries are, besides the early treatise which has just been mentioned, his Essays On Certain Demonstrative Roots (1830), and On the Influence of the Pronouns (1832); and above all, his Comparative Grammar of the Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, Gothic, and German (1833–1832), which fully established the original identity of the pronominal words and inflexions in all those languages. Schlegel, in a journal called the Indische Bibliothek, of which the first part appeared in 1820, did a great deal both to stimulate the study and extend the knowledge of Sanscrit among his countrymen; and a long series of Grammars and Lexicons, together with editions and translations of Sanscrit texts, have appeared from the pens of German scholars who for the most part have never travelled in India. It is true that these home-students have occasionally fallen into errors (see, for example, Gildemeister's tract entitled Die falsche Sanscritphilologie aus dem Beispiel des Herrn Dr Hoefler, Bonn, 1840); and that they have often engaged in comparative philology without a competent knowledge of Sanscrit. Others, again, have limited their acquirements to the Indian languages, and have seen Sanscrit names and Sanscrit ideas in domains to which they could not have penetrated. But there are instances, on the contrary, where this learning of the German universities, when directed by competent talent and sagacity, has produced fruits equal to those which have ripened on the soil of India itself; and Christian Lassen, in particular, a Norwegian settled at Bonn (born at Bergen in 1800), has either anticipated, or made good by important additions, the discoveries of Rawlinson at Bagdad and of James Prinsep at Calcutta. It is to be remarked, however, that the best edition and translation of a Sanscrit classic that has appeared in Europe, at least the most extensive labour of this kind, is the Ramayana from the Gaudana recension, published at Paris by the Italian scholar G. Gorresio. The Gorresio best Sanscrit grammars are those by Wilson and Monier Williams; and the same two scholars have produced as yet unrivalled Dictionaries—the former in Sanscrit and English, and the latter in English and Sanscrit. In one important department of Sanscrit learning, the study of the oldest religious books of the Brahmins, the publication of the Rig-Veda, the most ancient and important of these books, has been undertaken by this country; but the editorship has been intrusted to an able and learned German, Dr Max Müller, who is established as Taylorian F. Rosen and Max professor at Oxford. He has thus completed the work commenced by his countryman, the late Professor F. Rosen, of University College, London.

While Sanscrit scholarship was connecting itself thus intimately with the development of comparative philology, collateral aid of the most important kind was derived from an improved knowledge of another Arian language still spoken in the original abode of the Indo-Germanic race. This was the oldest form of the Medo-Persic idiom. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Anquetil du Perron had introduced into Europe a knowledge of the old languages of Persia, the Zend and the Pehlavi or Huzvaresh, the former deriving its name from "the book" (Zend, Sanscrit CRhandas), which contained "the text" (Avesta) of the Zoroastrian religion; and the latter from the heroic race (pahlau, "hero"; hu-zvaresh, "good heroism") who spoke it. But the most inconsistent and erroneous opinions were entertained respecting the nature and relations of these languages, until Rask, after his journey to the East, both established the genuineness of the Zend language and explained its true nature as an ancient type of the modern Persian. The complete establishment, however, of Zend as an important ingredient in Indo-Germanic philology is due to Eugène Burnouf (born in 1775, died in 1856), who, in his Commentaire sur le Yacna (Paris, 1835), submitted the Zend texts to a critical analysis, and arrived at philological results strictly analogous to those obtained by Grimm in German, and by Bopp in Sanscrit grammar. He has been followed by Spiegel and Westergaard; and it is now agreed that the Zend language represents a phase of the Arian speech very similar to the Sanscrit of the Vedas, and that the Avesta, in its original form, was drawn up probably in the north-eastern provinces of Persia—those on the borders of Sogdiana and Bactria—at some period anterior to the establishment of the South Persian dynasty of the Achaemenides. The language of South Persia under these kings has been recovered from the cuneiform inscriptions.

Comparative Philology. Lassen.

Study of Sanscrit.

Halhed, Jones, and Werdin.

Colebrooke, Wilkins, and Wilson.

Bopp and A. W. Schlegel.

Comparative Philology. —
inscriptions of the first Darins, which have been completely deciphered and interpreted by the perseverance and sagacity of Sir H. Rawlinson, assisted by the previous labours of Grotefend, Burnouf, and Lassen. The language of the Sassanian dynasty, the Pehlevi or Huzvaresh, though Indo-Germanic in its grammatical structure, is, like modern Persian, only of secondary importance to the comparative philologist.

Study of Pāli. —
Another collateral aid to the study of Sanscrit, as a main ingredient in comparative grammar, has been furnished by the researches of scholars in the field of Pāli records. In the sixth century B.C. Buddhism arose in India; and it is supposed with reason that the Pāli, which is the language of the Buddhist books in Ceylon, and which has many points of affinity with the Prākrit, or popular language of India, as represented by the dramas of the first century B.C., was the ordinary dialect of the Hindus at the time when Buddha preached. A language very like this has been traced in the inscriptions of the great Buddhist king Asoka, calling himself Piyadasi, who reigned from B.C. 260 to 220, and the interpretation of whose edicts is the glory of our countryman James Prinsep. For, as Mr Prinsep justly observed, "The Buddhists, like all sects who have appealed to the common-sense of the people against the learning and priestcraft of the schools, made use of the vernacular dialect." That the Pāli was a language corrupted by oral and perhaps provincial use is shown by many significant peculiarities, such as the omission of the liquid r, which is almost regular; thus the Sanscrit kṛitvā, "having made," becomes kated in Pāli; drīṣitvā, "having seen," becomes divā; srutvā, "having heard," becomes sutvā; and so on. In fact, its relation to the Sanscrit is that of the Romance languages to the Latin; and on this account, among others, it is an object of interest to the comparative philologist. It owes most to the researches of Burnouf and Lassen, who have done so much for the study of old Persian.

Armenian philology. —
Armenia, as the traditional cradle of the human race, naturally invited the attention of comparative philologists as soon as their science had gained an adequate amount of fixity. But although the Armenian is exhibited in a copious literature, these works are not more ancient than the fourth century A.D., and the spoken language is much corrupted by an infusion of Turkish ingredients. The grammar, however, is still decidedly Indo-Germanic; and by a philological analysis of its forms, such as that undertaken by Petermann, Windischmann, and Diefenbach, its affinities to the other members of the Arian family have been established in a very striking manner. These conclusions have been strengthened by a reference to the ancient traditions of Armenian mythology, which to a certain extent identify themselves with those of the Persians. Some valuable inferences may be derived from the statement of Herodotus (vii. 73), that the Armenians were colonists of the Phrygians—a statement which merely implies a recognition of affinity, and might be understood conversely. It can also be shown that the Armenians were related to the Cappadocians on the one hand, and to the Sauromatæ on the other. Striking affinities between the Armenian and the languages of Albania and Dalmatia have been pointed out. And it is not unlikely that the original ingredients of the Armenian language represent in a very ancient form the speech which was common to the oldest Arian settlers in Europe. (See Windischmann's Grundlage des Armenischen im Arianen Sprachstamme, Abhandl. d. Bayr. Akad. iv. Bd. Abth. ii.; Diefenbach's Review of Petermann's Grammar, Jahrbücher d. Wissenschaft. Kritik, 1843, Nos. 56, 57; Böttcher, Arica; Gosche, De Ariana Linguae gentisque Armeniaca indole; Ellis, Contributions to the Ethnography of Italy and Greece.)

In the valleys of the Caucasus, to the north of Armenia, an isolated branch of the Indo-Germanic family of languages has attracted the notice of philologists. This is the Ossetian, from the name Os, given by the Georgians to the people, who call themselves Iron. Their own traditions point to a time anterior to the thirteenth century, when their territory extended from the Caucasus to the Don; and there can be little doubt that they are an outlying branch of the same old Sarmatian stock. Klaproth first called attention to the linguistic importance of their idiom, which is not represented by any literature; and the Royal Academy of Berlin sent Dr George Rosen (a brother of the late Dr F. Rosen) to G. Rosen, the Caucasus to learn the Ossetian language from the lips of the Ossetians. The philological results of this expedition, which Rosen has published with the co-operation of Bopp, are an important addition to the materials of comparative grammar.

The earlier attempts to deal philologically with the Celtic languages were marked by the usual defects of conjectural etymology. The credit of having brought these banished, and in some of their last homes already obsolete idioms, within the domain of comparative grammar, is due to Dr Prichard, the founder of ethnography, whose book on The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations appeared in 1831; Prichard, and to his reviewer, the late Mr Richard Garnett, one of the most original and accomplished philologists whom this century has produced. Mr Garnett's contributions to Celtic and general philology, we are happy to say, are about to be republished in a collected form. On the Continent Dr Prichard has been followed by Bopp, Pietz, Diefenbach, and others. The results of their researches were made known by Dr Charles Meyer in the Report of the British Association for 1847; and he added the fruits of his own studies, which he had prosecuted with great diligence in the countries where Celtic is still spoken. The Grammatica Celtica of J. C. Zeuss (Leips. 1853) has entered fully into the antiquities of the Celtic languages, and has exhibited scientifically the relations of the different dialects with regard to the laws of sound and the development of the inflexions; and some important contributions to Celtic philology are contained in the Éthnographie Gauloise (Paris, 1858) of the Baron de Belloguet.

Independently, however, of the more recent investigations into the nature of the various Asiatic and European branches of the Indo-Germanic family of languages, the affinity and mutual relations of these modifications of human speech were fully and finally established more than twenty years ago. At any rate, since the year 1833, when the first part of Bopp's Comparative Grammar and the first volume of Pott's Etymological Researches appeared together, there has been no doubt that, from the Ganges and the ridges of the Vindhya Mountains to the shores of the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic, one great mother tongue is spoken, or preserved in writing; and that, although the different Arian or Indo-Germanic races are no longer able to understand one another,—though, in fact, long and earnest study is required before the more distant members of the family can interchange oral communications, and though a similar effort is required to pass from the living to the dead forms of the same language,—yet there must have been a time when the original representatives of these widely-separated tribes were united on the table-land of Iran, bound by ties of brotherhood, and speaking the common speech, which may almost be reproduced by a comparison of the different forms of its living children or of their direct progenitors, embalmed in classical and sacred literature. In this great family it is now seen that there are six main branches—I. The Indian: Branches of the Indo-Germanic family of languages. II. The Medo-Persic, including the Armenian, Ossetian, and perhaps the Albanian; III. The Sclavonic, comprising the Lithuanian; IV. The Teutonic, embracing the Scandinavian languages; V. The Celtic; VI. The Greco-Latin, including the old classical languages, with all their dialects.

Comparative Philology. and their modern offspring the Romance languages, namely, the Provençal and French, the Italian, the Spanish and Portuguese, the Rhaetican, and the Wallachian. The Indo-Germanic family, then, comprehends, besides some of the most important Asiatic languages, all the languages of Europe, except the Turanian idioms spoken by the Finus, Laplanders, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Turks, and the isolated Basque or Euskarian language still vernacular in the north-west of Spain. In all these Arian languages, not only are a vast number of the most common and necessary words traceable to an identity by the application of certain established laws for the permutations of consonants, but it can be seen that

Comparative Philology. their system of inflexions, and all the machinery of their grammar, either now works, or must at one time have worked, according to the same organization. The results are as certain as those of any other department of inductive science; and there is little room either for felicitous conjecture or ingenious blundering.

It may be worth while to show, by a few specimens, the nature of the induction on which Arian philology depends. We shall therefore exhibit some of the most important resemblances of the Indo-Germanic idioms, in those words which belong to the inherited treasures of every language, and in the elementary forms of the nouns and verbs.

To show that these languages, exhibiting such marks of affinity, need not, on that account, claim any one of their number as the parent-stock, but may all have sprung from one common source, it is only necessary to make a similar comparison in the case of the Romance languages, which we know may be derived from their common mother, the classical Latin. Let us take, for instance, the substantive verb in six of these languages, and we shall see that the form in each bears a relation to sum, different from that which this latter does to any of the five forms with which we have compared it above:—

It is clear, on the most cursory inspection, that all these forms are derivatives from sum; and we shall be still farther convinced of their secondary condition if we find, as we do on further examination, that the substantive verb in the Romance languages generally borrows some of its tenses from the Latin stare, "to stand;" that all Romance verbs of the regular type form their future by annexing the present term of habere, "to have," in its corrupted state, avere, haber, aver, or avoir, to the infinitive mood of each

verb, which in the Provençal is often separated by the interposition of another word; and that although the French alone forms its infinitive from stare (for être is the modern form of ester, from estar), while all the other Romance languages have their infinitives formed from esse (Ital. essere, Prov. esser, Span. ser), yet the future ser-ai of the French substantive verb proves that they must once have agreed in this point also. While, then, the resemblances of these forms among themselves are analogous to those of the substantive verb as it appears in the older Indo-Germanic languages, including the Latin, we are able to trace their derivation from this idiom, just as we can derive the Prākrit from the Sanscrit; but we cannot thus deduce any of the older Arian languages from another of the same class. We see the same marks of resemblance among the dialects themselves, combined with still more striking proofs of derivation from a common original, in those cases in which a tendency to abbreviation, already observable in Latin, has been consistently carried out in the principal Roman languages. Take, for example, the habit of dropping the letter d when it is flanked by two vowels. That this took place in ancient Latin is clear, not only from the old pronunciation, as indicated by the exigencies of the comic meters, but even by a few instances in which this letter is omitted in writing. Thus, while we see that pater and quidem were often monosyllables, we remark that the d is absolutely dropped in writing in such forms as esfor edis, est for edit, and perhaps item for itidem. This tendency, which is only indicated in Latin, becomes uniformly phenomenal in the Romance languages, and not only d, but t, disappear in most of the words which have passed, without direct borrowing at a later period, from Latin into French or Italian. If we compare the old words Noel and naif with the forms natal and nativé, which have been taken from the Latin since the French became a fixed language (Schlegel, Observations sur la Langue et la Littérature Provençales, p. 44), we shall see that this omission of the t must have prevailed among the Roman provincials themselves, and was not caused by anything peculiar to the French articulation. Sometimes this dropping of the dental is accompanied by other absorptions, which reduce the original word to a bare residuum. Thus the pronominal adjective même, signifying identity in general, Spanish mismo, Portuguese mesmo, although the dental is retained in the Italian medesimo, is quite a disguised representative of the original memet ipsissimum. To extend these comparisons is not our present duty. The few samples which we have given will suffice to show the nature of the evidence on which the comparative philologist has to rely.

Comparative Philology. The scientific certainty, attained by these researches of comparative philology in the domain of the Arian or Indo-Germanic languages, has not unnaturally led to the wish on the part of those who have prosecuted them, that they might, on the one hand, be connected with the results of the older classical and sacred criticism, and, on the other hand, that they might be extended so as to embrace primarily the Semitic languages, which are connected by their literature rather than their idiomatic texture with those of the Arian race, and one of which holds a place by the side of Greek among the studies of the older school of philology; and so as to reach ultimately to a classification of human speech in general, and thus to form a basis for the collateral science of ethnology.

Comparative grammar combined with the old classical philology. A combination of the results of comparative grammar with those of the older classical philology was sure to take place sooner or later, and sooner rather than later. Just about the time when the study of Sanscrit literature was beginning to establish itself in Europe, several scholars, who had not yet made acquaintance with this guide to the analysis of organic inflexions, exhibited a tendency to seek for etymologies in the classical languages by a more rational system of comparison with other tongues than had previously been attempted. For example, Buttmann

Buttmann. showed, by the various articles collected in his Mythologus, some of which date as far back as the end of the last century, by his Lexilogus, of which the first volume appeared in 1818, and by his paper on the Electron, which was read in the same year, that he was in spirit a comparative philologist, and would have made an ample use of his opportunities if he had lived a few years longer, or had been born a few years later. The German language, in particular, was brought into direct comparison with Greek and Latin, not always scientifically, but sometimes quite correctly, by Drs Jamieson, Hunter, and Carson in Scotland, and by Jackell and Ramshorn in Germany. In the year 1828, the establishment of Dr F. Rosen as professor of Sanscrit in University College, London, awakened the attention of classical teachers and students in that institution to a sense of the important results which might be obtained by a combination of Greek and Latin philology with the methods which had resulted from the comparative study of Sanscrit grammar. In 1836, only three years after the appearance of the first part of Bopp's grammar, one of the most eminent philologists of the old school, K. O. Müller, expressed himself in the following decided language (Kleine Schriften, i., p. 12):—"It has now indeed come to this, that philology must either renounce altogether any historical knowledge about the growth of language, and all etymological researches into the form of roots and the organism of grammatical structures, or trust herself in these matters entirely to the guidance and counsels of the comparative study of language." It is true that some of those who had obtained eminence in classical criticism, and their immediate disciples, regarded comparative philology with much suspicion and distrust. For example, Godfrey Hermann, in the paper which suggested Müller's remarks, had spoken with some contempt of those "who sought light from a sort of aurora borealis, reflecting the gleams of eastern illumination, and who, betaking themselves to the Brahmins and Ulfilas, endeavoured to explain Greek and Latin by the help of languages which they only half understood." Another eminent verbal scholar, K. A. Lobeck, in his Aglaphamus (published in 1829), in his Paralipomena (published in 1837), and in his Pathologia (published in 1843), indicated how little confidence he had in Sanscrit as a help to the Greek grammarian. And the same protest against the claims of Sanscritism was made in 1835 by F. Ellendt, a pupil of Lobeck, in the Preface to his Lexicon Sophocleum. In January 1837 the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St Petersburg published a scheme for a prize essay on the Greek dialects from which all consideration

of Sanscrit was to be excluded. It was about the time when these opposite opinions were entertained respecting the propriety of an intimate alliance between the old and new philology, that the writer of these pages, who had been indirectly brought within the reach of Rosen's influence in 1829-30, undertook to prove that, by making the classical languages, and especially the Greek, the basis of a scientific method of comparative grammar, not only would the general results be more definite and important than those which had been obtained by starting from the Indian or Teutonic members of the Arian family, but that very great advantages would redound to the improvement of Greek and Latin philology in particular. The first product of these studies appeared in February 1839, the second in 1844; and the author's labours have been continued in this field down to the present time, either in successive editions of these original works, or in auxiliary labours having the same object in view. There are still strong prejudices in favour of the old-fashioned methods of teaching Greek and Latin grammar, arising chiefly from a conventional and conservative bias in favour of established traditions; but it is to be hoped that the stream of philological speculation has finally turned its course into the right direction, and that those who undertake to reason on the grammar and word-forms of the classical languages will from henceforth seek their rules and principles in the method which has been confirmed by the comparative study of the Arian family as a whole.

From the comparison of the Indo-Germanic idioms with Comparative Philology. Comparative philology extended to the Semitic languages. From the comparison of the Indo-Germanic idioms with one another, the general philologist's next step was to consider the relationship between the different families of languages; and his attention would be arrested primarily by the Semitic group, one of which had connected itself with the special studies of the older school of criticism. The general result of the philological analysis, in the case of the Arian languages, was to show that all words were ultimately reducible to monosyllabic roots, which were, so to speak, set in a framework of significant prefixes and affixes. On the other hand, the Semitic languages presented, both in their nouns and verbs, a basis of trilateral or bisyllabic roots, beyond which the analysis of the grammarian did not attempt to penetrate. As early as the seventeenth century it had been suggested that these trilateral roots may have been primarily biliteral. Michaelis was prepared, in Michaelis. the latter part of his life, to relinquish the trilateral system (see Adelung, Mithridates, i., p. 302); the great critical Hebraists of the present century, Gesenius and Ewald, had admitted that, by recognising monosyllabic roots in Hebrew, we might compare that language with the various members of the Indo-Germanic family; and Klaproth, in Klaproth. 1828, plainly asserted that the Hebrew roots were originally and properly monosyllabic. ("Observations sur les Racines des Langues Sémitiques," in Merian's Principes de l'Étude Comparative des Langues, pp. 212, sq.) A more formal and systematic attempt to establish the original monosyllabism of the Semitic languages, and especially of the Aramaic branch, was made by Julius Fürst in his Lehr-Fürst. gebäude der Aramäischen Idiome, mit Bezug auf die Indo-Germanischen Sprachen (Leipzig, 1835); and in his Veteris Testamenti Concordantia (completed in 1840). The procedure of Fürst was recommended in an enthusiastic and somewhat extravagant manner by his pupil, F. Delitzsch, Delitzsch. in his Jesurun (Isagoge in Grammaticam et Lexicographiam Linguae Hebraicae contra G. Gesenium et H. Ewaldum), which appeared as an Introduction to Fürst's Concordance in 1838. Meantime Æmilus Rödiger, who, like Rödiger. Delitzsch, belonged to Halle, and has succeeded Gesenius in that university, was prosecuting similar researches with regard to the structure of the oldest form of Arabic; and a young scholar, Charles Richard Lepsius, who had enjoyed the advantage of direct intercourse with the best

philologists at Leipzig, Göttingen, and Berlin, and was pursuing his researches at Paris in the domain of the old Egyptian and Coptic languages, published some essays indicating the most remarkable genius for philology, and tending to establish the affinity not only between the Indo-Germanic and Semitic languages, but also between both of these and the old language of Egypt. (Palisographie als Mittel für die Sprachforschung zunächst aus Sanskrit nachgewiesen, Berlin, 1834; Zwei Sprachvergleichende Abhandlungen, ib. 1836.) In the last of these essays Lepsius quite established the affinities of the Egyptian, Semitic, and Indo-Germanic languages, in regard to the numerals and some of the most important of the pronominal elements.

And here the discovery of the clue to the Egyptian hieroglyphics (see articles EGYPT, HIEROGLYPHICS, CHAMPOLLION), produced an immense influence on the determination of the problems to be solved by those who would establish the affinities between the two central families of languages. As the hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic inscriptions have been partially deciphered, as the grammatical forms have been established, and the interpretation of particular words ascertained and the virtual identity of the Coptic with the language of the Pharaohs placed beyond doubt, the newly-acquired knowledge has been pressed into the service of comparative philology, and elaborate works have been written, not merely for the purpose of exhibiting the relationship between the Semitic and the old Egyptian (as in Benfey's treatise Über das Verhältniss der Ägyptischen Sprache zum Semitischen Sprachstamm, Leipzig, 1844), or of analysing the structure of the Coptic language with reference to the principles of Indo-Germanic philology in general (as in M. G. Schwartz's great work,

Das Alte Ägypten, Leipzig, 1843, of which he lived to write only the Introduction, in more than 2000 closely-printed quarto pages!), but still more, in order to make Egyptology a sort of elevated standing-point, from which all the realms of ethnography and philology might be surveyed, and the most distant and isolated points brought within the range of view. This undertaking has been attempted chiefly by Bunsen, who has completed in five volumes his work entitled Ägypten's Stelle in der Weltgeschichte ("Egypt's Place in Universal History," Hamburg, 1846-1857), and has discussed some of the same subjects in a more general and miscellaneous book, or collection of treatises, called Christianity and Mankind, their Beginnings and Prospects (London, 1854). It is Bunsen's theory that "the Egyptian language is the point in universal history at which the creative energy of language still shows its original form, just before it raises its pinions aloft, and assumes in the world-ruling nations an entirely different and more spiritual form, while in the other races, according to laws not yet explored, it sinks into the atonic and mechanical, or at best defects into subordinate ramifications." (Ägypten, i., p. 338.) Looking back over a period of more than 20,000 years, this philological speculator recognises a time when the as yet undivided families of Japhet and Shem lived together in a civilized state in Northern Asia. From this undivided Asiatic stock Egypt, according to Bunsen, must be a colony, gradually degenerated into the African type, for the old Egyptian language claims affinity at once with the Aramaic idioms in immediate contact with it, and with the Indo-Germanic tongues, with which it has no direct commerce. (Report of the Brit. Assoc., 1847, p. 280; Ägypten, iv., Pref., p. 10.) It must be owned that these sweeping conclusions do not rest upon philological inductions of the most accurate kind, and are supported by arguments which are sometimes as arbitrary as they are precarious.

Bunsen.

Meanwhile the comparative philology of the Semitic languages has been assisted by other palæographical discoveries scarcely less important than that of the hieroglyphic syllabary. At the beginning of the present century, Professor G. T. Grotefend (born in 1775) made a first attempt to explain the cuneiform or arrow-headed writing of the old Persian inscriptions. His discovery was announced in the Göttingen Literary Gazette of 1802; but a full account of it did not appear till 1815, when it was given in the appendix to the third edition of Heeren's Ideen. The subject was pursued without any important results by M. Saint Martin, whose Memoir was read at Paris in 1823. More valuable verifications were secured by Rask's identifications in 1826 of the signs of M and N Rask, in the name Achemenes. In 1836 appeared Burnouf's Burnouf, Memoir on the cuneiform inscriptions of Hamadan, which contained some interesting discoveries; and in the same year Lassen published his work on the Old Persian Cuneiform Inscription of Persepolis, which supplied an identification of at least twelve characters mistaken by his predecessors, and which secures for him perhaps the most honourable place in this band of decipherers. Meanwhile, however, an able British officer was prosecuting in the East, and with complete success, the cuneiform studies which the learning and ingenuity of these European scholars had already advanced so far. In 1835, Major (now Colonel Sir H. C.) Rawlinson, being posted at Kermanshah, on the Rawlinson. western frontier of Persia, began to direct his attention to the cuneiform alphabet, and the inscriptions written in it. With the exception of Grotefend, none of the other labourers in this field were known to Rawlinson. He did not receive Burnouf's Memoir till 1838, the year after he had sent to the Asiatic Society his translation of the first two paragraphs of the Behistun inscription; and it was only in 1839 that Lassen sent him a précis of his improved system of interpretation. By this time, chiefly by the aid of Burnouf's Yagna, he had completed a literal translation of some 200 lines of cuneiform writing, and by the year 1846 this was augmented by more than 400 lines, and the Persian portion of the Behistun inscriptions of Darius I. was no longer a sealed book to scholars. That inscription, however, like others of the same age, was trilingual. Besides the Persian recital of the deeds of Darius, which Rawlinson had mastered, there was a Semitic or Aramaic version for the conquered inhabitants of Assyria and Babylonia; and one in a Tataric or Turanian dialect, for the benefit of the Scythian tribes beyond the Oxus. As early as 1845 Rawlinson had recognised the Semitic character of the second, or, as it stands on the monument, the third of these inscriptions, and had begun to examine the proper names in it; he had also surmised that the other inscription was Turanian, and not, as some inferred, Median; and the soundness of this opinion has since been established by Mr E. Norris. Rawlinson prosecuted his investigations respecting the Assyrian inscriptions, comparing the Behistun monument with the bricks and other excavated memorials from Nineveh and elsewhere, till, in 1849, he was enabled to decipher and interpret some of these ancient records, and to ascertain the nature of the language in which they were written; and his views have been confirmed in many points by the contemporary and independent labours of Dr E. Hincks, who has done a good deal towards exhibiting Hincks. the grammatical structure of this old form of the Semitic languages. The result of these inquiries has been to show that the language spoken at Nineveh in the days of Sennacherib and his predecessors was a very ancient type of the language which is recognised as the basis of Arabic and Hebrew.

Comparative Philology.

Discovery of the key to the cuneiform inscriptions. Grotefend.

Lassen.

Rawlinson.

Norris.

the Himyaric inscriptions.

The oldest form of Arabic is that which is still spoken in the south of Arabia. Its primitive type is exhibited in the Himyaric inscriptions which have been fully investigated since 1830 by Fresnel, Gesenius, Rödiger, and Ewald. Linguistic affinities show that the Ethiopic or Abyssinian, which

Comparative Philology. is called Gheez by the people who speak it, is an offshoot from the ancient Himyaric.

Another ancient form of the Semitic, approaching to the Arabic in many points, has been learned from the inscriptions in the peninsula of Sinai. Although these inscriptions had been known for many hundred years, they were not deciphered till Dr E. Beer of Leipzig published his account of the alphabet in 1840-1843 (Inscriptiones veteres Litteris huc usque incognitis ad Montem Sinai scriptae); and his views have been carried out with complete success by Professor Tuch (Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., 1849, pp. 129-215). It is concluded, with much probability, that the language of these inscriptions is that of the ancient Amalekites and other Bedouins of the Sinaitic peninsula.

Classification of the Semitic languages. These palaeographical investigations, combined with a more rational system of grammatical criticism, have enabled scholars to settle the mutual relations of the Semitic languages, and to determine the area occupied by them and the distinctive peculiarities of their structure. The best classification of this group of languages seems to be the following:—I. The old Babylonian or Assyrian, established in the primitive abodes of the Semitic race between the Tigris and the western borders of Iran. From this the Aramaic dialects—the Chaldee and Syriac—derive their origin. II. The old Canaanitish, of which the Hebrew and Phœnician were important dialects. III. The old Arabic, of which the Ethiopic and Abyssinian are offshoots, and which is represented by the modern Arabic in all its literary and geographical developments. IV. The old Egyptian, which is a deposit of some ante-historical Semitic idiom, disorganized by certain local influences. It is represented in a modern form by the Coptic. V. The Berber dialects scattered over the whole north of Africa, from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean, and still distinct from the cognate Arabic of the Mohammedan conquerors.

Contacts of the Arian and Semitic families to be sought in the Sclavonian. In seeking a point of contact between these languages and those of the Indo-Germanic class, it has seemed most reasonable to the writer of these pages to look to the district where one of the oldest, if not the very oldest, of the Semitic tribes appears to have been geographically conterminous with a very old Indo-Germanic people,—namely, the district that was occupied by the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, in close contact with the old Sauromate or Sclavonians. He has developed the following argument in a special essay on the subject ("On two Unsolved Problems in Indo-German Philology," Report of the British Association for 1851, pp. 143, sqq.) The Sclavonians may be identified with that branch of the great Iranian family which occupied Media, and therefore in their original home stand in close contact with the Assyrians of the adjoining plain. Now, these Assyrians, according to Rawlinson's investigations, spoke a very old form of the Semitic language. But, according to a general agreement among scholars, the Chaldeans, who conquered the plains of Mesopotamia in the eighth century B.C., were an Indo-Germanic tribe, whom some identify with the Sclavonians, while others called them Medo-Persic, which is much the same thing. Consequently, Semitic and Indo-German tribes were in close contact, if not intermingled with one another, on the banks of the Tigris. When, therefore, we find that although the Sclavonian and Semitic tongues stand in direct antithesis or contrast so far as their state or condition is concerned,—the former being marked by the fulness of the etymological forms, and the absence of syntactical machinery, and the latter by a trilateral uniformity and a pervading syntactical mechanism,—they nevertheless present, both in words and forms, the most remarkable indications of original affinity, we are bound to conclude that the inference from their geographical contiguity is philologically also valid and satisfactory.

Even if the relationship between the two great central families of language—the Indo-Germanic and the Semitic—were fully ascertained and established, the comparative philologist would not have completed his examination of the affinities of human speech. For (to say nothing of the languages of America and Central and Southern Africa) the idioms spoken by the Finns, Hungarians, and Turks in Europe, and by the tribes scattered over the whole of Northern and Eastern Asia, together with the dialects of the aboriginal inhabitants of Southern India, constitute a class of linguistic phenomena, which differ in the most striking manner from the Arian and Aramaic types. An attempt, however, has been made to classify these languages, and to group them together in accordance with certain peculiarities which they have in common. These languages are called by the general name Turanian, a word derived from the root tur, signifying "to be swift," "to roam about;" and therefore indicating generally the nomadic character of the tribes which are distinguished by these varieties of human speech. The first beginning of the scientific classification of the different members of the Turanian family was made by John Sainovics, who, in 1770, published at Copenhagen his Demonstratio Idioma Hungaricum et Lapponicum idem esse. He was an Austrian astronomer of Hungarian extraction, and had noticed these affinities when sent with Kell to Lapland in 1764. The same position was maintained by Ibre-Oehrling (De Convenientia Linguae Lapponicae cum Hungarica, Upsal, 1777); and Hager (Neuen Beweisen der Verwandtschaft der Ungarn Hager mit den Lapländern, Vienna, 1794). But the most complete work on the subject was Dr Samuel Gyarmathi's Affinitas Linguae Hungaricae cum Linguis Finnicae Originis grammaticae demonstrata (Göttingen, 1799). This work proves the identity of the Hungarian with all three of the Chadic dialects, the Finnish, the Estonian, and the Lapish; and adopts in the proof a truly philological method. A comparison of the Asiatic branches of the Turanian family was first attempted by Klaproth (Reise in den Kaukasus, 1814); and the whole of the un-Arian and un-Semitic races were boldly grouped together by the great philologist Rask (Über die Thrakische Sprachklasse, 1818; Zend-Sprache, 1826), under the general name of Scythian. He found in the language of Greenland a link of connection between the idioms of Asia, Europe, and America; and divided the great Scythian race into four main classes,—the North Asiatic, the North American, the Tatar, and the Mongol-Tungusian. The details of the subject were prosecuted with great success by William Schott, who, after stating the case in his Essays on the Tatars and Finns, published in 1836 and 1847, went fully into the linguistic proofs in his valuable paper Über das Altairische oder Finnisch-Tatarische Sprachengeschlecht (Berlin, 1849). At the same time, Alexander Castrén of Helsingfors, by his travels and the various treatises in which he expounded the results of his inquiries, beginning with his Elementa Grammaticae Syrianae, published in 1844, and ending with his Reise-Erinnerungen, published in 1853, completely established the general principles of Turanian philology. Some of these views, especially those of Schott, have been controverted by Bechtlingk (Über die Sprache der Jakuten, 1851); but the general features of resemblance have been undoubtedly recognised: the peculiar system of vocalization, the process of agglutination by which the naked roots are formed into words, the identities in certain primitive terms, such as the numerals, which in such widely scattered tribes could not have been borrowed by mutual intercourse in the historical ages,—all this, and much else that might be mentioned, would render it considerably more difficult to establish the total independence and diversity of the Turanian tribes than to seek in the peculiar circumstances of their dispersed and nomadic condition for a natural ex-

planation of the heterogeneous elements in this wide-spread manifestation of human speech. The subject has been so well discussed in English by Dr Max Müller, that we need only refer to what he has written on the subject in the first volume of Bunsen's Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History (London, 1854), or in his own little work On the Languages of the Seat of War in the East (second edition, London, 1855). The classification of the Turanian languages, according to the most recent researches, is the following:—I. The Finnic, including the Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chudic, &c. II. The Samoedic, divided into the northern and eastern branches. III. The Turkish or Tataric, including the Uzbeks, Turcomans, Baskirs, Yakuts, Rumelians, and Anatolians. IV. The Mongolic, including the Eastern or Proper Mongols, the Western Mongols, such as the Kalmucks, and the Northern Mongols, such as the Buriats. V. The Tungusic, divided into the western and eastern branches. To these must be added, according to the researches of Max Müller, the Tamulic, Bhotiya, Tai, and Malay languages of the aboriginal tribes inhabiting the Deccan, the sub-Himalayan plains, the trans-Gangetic empires of Siam and Assam, and the Polynesian. There are many striking resemblances between this last group of Turanian languages and the Chinese; and we are strongly inclined to think that the latter is merely a form of the Turanian variety of human speech brought into a different state or condition, by the change from the nomadic to the city life.

The languages of America, to the south of that Turanian fringe which is occupied by the Esquimaux, have not yet been brought into recognized relationship with those of the older continent. Among themselves, however, they fall into distinguishable groups, and both their traditions, and certain peculiarities in the laws which regulate their word-formations, point to the north-east of Asia as the origin of their race, and to the Turanian languages as the parent-stock of their idioms. If this shall ever be established on evidence which the philologist can admit as scientifically valid, diversities of language will oppose no obstacle to the traditional belief of the unity of the human race, a belief confirmed by the invariable testimony of history, that man has ever occupied new and vacant regions by migration, and by the same process which is still in full activity. So far as it is allowed to anticipate by conjecture the results which comparative philology, in its widest range, may one day hope to realize, the following will be the ultimatum of linguistic ethnography:—Mankind was divided in the ante-historical period into two great connected families, from which all the rest of the world's population has been derived. From the Semitic, occupying primarily the regions of Mesopotamia, Syria, Asia Minor, and Arabia, was derived the population of all Africa. From the Indo-Germanic, primarily settled on the great table-land of Iran, was derived an unbroken series of connected tribes extending into India to the south-east, and spreading to the north and west over the whole of Europe. Of these tribes, the oldest, it seems, were the Celtic emigrants. Next in antiquity, or in the date at which they left their home in Asia, were the Sclavonic nations, including the Lithuanians; and the last or newest immigration into Europe was that of the Teutonic tribes, beginning with those which we call the Low Germans. About the time when these Low Germans left the north-eastern frontier of Iran, it is probable that the Arians began their descent from Bokhara in the direction of the Punjab; and it is calculated roughly that this must have been about 1400 B.C.; so that the Hindu-Arians are among the youngest members of the family in reference to the period at which they settled in their new abodes, though, being among the last to leave their native seats, they have retained more completely perhaps than any of the sister tribes the original characteristics of the language once

common to them all. The traces of Indo-Germanic affinity, which are still perceivable in the Turanian idioms, render it probable that these nomadic races broke away from Iran at various periods of undefinable antiquity, or in hordes or clans inconsiderable in number; and that, being kept apart by the very circumstances of their pastoral and wandering life, they lost more and more the original type of their language, and fell into a mode of speaking suited to their detached and deteriorated condition. Where geographical advantages led to re-centralization, as in China, these disintegrated languages assumed new forms, passed, according to one proposed subdivision, from the nomad to the state or political type (Max Müller in Bunsen's Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, i., p. 282), and connected themselves with literary developments, which again influenced their structure. In accordance with this general view of the population of the world, spreading from a common origin and a common home over the whole face of the globe, a view which rests on the oldest records of the human race, and is supported by the inductions of philology, as far as the comparison of languages has been carried up to this time, we have proposed the following classification of the varieties of human speech (New Cratylus, § 69):—Languages are either (A) Central or (B) Sporadic. In the first of these classes there are two main subdivisions, (1.) The Indo-Germanic or Arian; (2.) The Semitic or Syro-Arabian. In the second we place all the African and Turanian languages, adding to them, without, as yet, any accurate means of approximation, the varieties of speech found in America and the Pacific Ocean. And the Sporadic languages also apportion themselves in two groups to the two subdivisions of the central class, the African languages belonging to the Semitic, and the Turanian claiming, however faintly, some affiliation to the Arian stock.

Such are the results, obtained or probable, by which comparative philology has fortified the conclusions of the new science of ethnography. The founder of that science, Dr J. C. Prichard, concluded a general survey of the subject with the following words (Report of the British Association for 1847, p. 253):—"I may venture to remark, that with the increase of knowledge in every direction, we find continually less and less reason for believing that the diversified races of men are separated from each other by insurmountable barriers." And A. von Humboldt, to whom he refers with gratification at having arrived at the same ultimate conviction, has thus expressed his sense of the achievements of philological science:—"Languages," he says (Kosmos, ii., p. 142), "when compared together and considered as objects of the natural history of the mind, and when separated into families according to the analogies existing in their internal structure, have become a rich source of historical knowledge; and this is probably one of the most brilliant results of modern study in the last sixty or seventy years. From the very fact of their being products of our intellectual powers, they lead us back, by the elementary character of their organization, to an obscure distance, unreached by traditional records. The comparative study of languages shows how races now separated by vast tracts of land are allied to each other, and have migrated from one common primitive abode; it indicates the course and direction of all migrations; and, in tracing the leading epoch of development, recognises, by means of the more or less changed structure of the language, in the permanence of certain forms, or in the more or less advanced destruction of the formative system, which portion of the race has retained most nearly the language common to all who had migrated from the general seat of their origin."

But comparative philology has not been content with furnishing the ethnographer with the most important data for the establishment of the great religious and moral

Comparative Philology. truth, that all men spring from one blood, and are distinguished from all other living creatures not only by the common possession of reason, but by the common inheritance of a language impressed with the same laws, and bearing in the central and most civilized nations the most marked traces of its derivation from a common source. The comparative philologist not only undertakes to prove that mankind, now dispersed over the whole face of the earth, were at one time a united family; but he is enabled, by an examination of the common elements of language, to ascertain the nature of the civilization which men enjoyed, and of the religious belief and worship which represented their spiritual aspirations, at a period long anterior to their local separation. "Comparative philology," says Max Müller (Oxford Essays for 1856, p. 11), "has brought this whole period within the pale of documentary history. It has placed in our hands a telescope of such power that, where formerly we could see but nebulous clouds, we now discover distinct forms and outlines; nay, it has given us what we may call contemporary evidence, exhibiting to us the state of thought, language, religion, and civilization, at a period when Sanscrit was not yet Sanscrit, Greek not yet Greek, but when both, together with Latin, German, and other Arian dialects, existed as yet as one undivided language, in the same manner as French, Italian, and Spanish may be said to have at one time existed as one undivided language in the form of Latin."

Comparative mythology. As these applications of comparative philology fall into two distinct classes, one referring to the primitive history, the other to the primitive belief of a race, it would be desirable to have them designated by two distinct names. To the latter application the name of "comparative mythology" has been given, and very high functions have been claimed for it by the eminent German writer to whom we owe the first English essay on the subject. "If," says Max Müller (Oxford Essays, 1856, p. 86), "Hegel calls the discovery of the common origin of Greek and Sanscrit the discovery of a new world, the same may be said with regard to the common origin of Greek and Sanscrit mythology. The discovery is made, and the science of comparative mythology will soon rise to the same importance as comparative philology." It appears to us that, in the delight which the comparative philologist feels in this application of his own grammatical principles to the examination of ancient beliefs, he is apt to be carried beyond the proper limits of the investigation, which he pursues with such justifiable enthusiasm, or, at all events, that he is liable to neglect the other considerations by which his theories should be guided and corrected. Mythology cannot always be treated strictly according to the laws of language. When we recognise a community of religious fable among a number of different nations, this may be the result of contacts subsequent even to a comparatively recent historical period, or it may arise from something common to the human mind, and suggested by circumstances which may occur in any country, and at any epoch. With regard to the former of these, it is clear that the dualism which prevailed among the Jews after their captivity, and which was not known to them before, was a direct result of their intercourse with the Medo-Persian race, which had for a long time cultivated this form of religion; and its adoption by the Teutonic nations, in connection with a corrupted Christianity, was only in part a result of their inheritance of a mythology ultimately traceable to their primitive home in Iran. On the other hand, the legend which we find in all countries of the interruption of some attempt to sacrifice a human victim, and the substitution of some lower animal as a sort of vicarious atonement, seems to be due in every case to an independent origin, namely, to the feeling of revulsion with which a better instinct or a better culture must always, sooner or later, repudiate the practice of slaying human beings at the

altar of a malignant deity. Not to speak of the interrupted sacrifice of Isaac, the legend of Iphigenia, the substitution of whipping the boys at the shrine of Artemis Orthoria instead of slaying them outright, and even the fight of gladiators at the grave of the deceased warrior instead of immolating the prisoners of war, as we see in the Homeric funeral of Patroclus, must be regarded as so many manifestations of the instinct of humanity, whether the original practice of homicidal adoration, and the cannibalism which was its still earlier prototype, was or was not connected with the Semitic worship of Moloch. The attempts made by some of the German scholars (who have taken up this application of comparative philology with the enthusiasm peculiar to their class) to support their inferences by etymological researches, have not often been very happy. Conceding, for example, that the elements of the Greek and Sanscrit Ereōnōs and Satyōcracas may be referred to identical roots, and that the compounds convey in every way precisely the same complex notion, it seems to us little less than absurd to suppose, as Dr Kuhn has done (Zeitschrift f. Vergl. Sprachf., iv., p. 100), that the son of (Edipus, who died in fratricidal strife at Thebes, is the same mythological personage as the Satyōcracas mentioned in the Rig-Veda, who is designated as Sahiyas, "the strong" or "victorious," and who is called the offspring of Vayya, to be identified with Δαίος by a change of v into l. Comparative mythology, as it appears to us, is only valuable, when viewed in connection with ethnography, and when a due regard is paid to the antiquity of the myths and to the circumstances under which they originated. Every nation is capable of working up the old materials into new forms and combinations; and even at a comparatively late period fresh additions to a pantheon are devised or borrowed. Only imperfect information would confuse between the Sarapis of the Ptolemies and the old deities of the Pharaohs; and no Indian scholar would suppose that the Siva worship, which was introduced during the historical ages, or that of Krishna, which exhibits some traces of the influences of Christianity, and perhaps echoes even the name of the Author of our faith, were connected by direct descent with the Vaidic ages, when the Arian forefathers of the Hindus were offering the Soma-drink (i.e., the juice of the Asclepias acida) to their primeval and elementary divinities. If, therefore, worship could change, and mythology could be created in the comparatively later ages of Egyptian and Indian history, we ought surely to allow an equal elasticity to the plastic imagination of the ancient Greeks, and abstain from impugning by precarious comparisons their well-established claims to poetical originality.

To the other of these new applications of comparative philology, namely, the attempt to make language tell the history of ancient times long anterior to the commencement of written annals, we would propose to give the name of "linguistic records of civilization;" and we recognise in this a means of making discoveries at once certain and important. By examining words of constant occurrence which are common to all the branches of the Indo-Germanic family, we are carried back to a time anterior to the separations of the different branches, and we find in the interpretation of the terms themselves distinct glimpses of the mode of life which could alone have given rise to such designations. In the same way, we argue that the words which are common to only a limited number among the different languages must either show that these branches remained in contact, after the others had left the common home, or, perhaps, in some new home, or must be received as a proof that the separation from the primitive stock was in these cases a very early one. We may take as an example the word designating "son" in the chief Arian languages. The common Sanscrit term is putra, and in Celtic we have a form virtually identical—poatr. But this exact resemblance is not recognisable in the synonyms found in other branches of the family. As we

know that the Celts were not in contact with the Indians at a late period, this phenomenon alone is a strong confirmation of the theory, resting mainly on other considerations, that the Celtic tribes were those which first left Iran, and that they did so when putra or paotr was the one term for "son" used by the Iranians; that is, before other terms were introduced or generally adopted. Conversely, there is no term in Sanscrit, or in the Teutonic and Slavonic branches of the family, corresponding immediately to the Greek φύς or vis, and its Latin congener filius, both of which are derived, the latter with a patronymic affix peculiar to the Italian races, from the common root φύω or fio, "to be born." From this we infer with certainty a contact or union between the forefathers of the Greeks and Italians long after their separation from the one Arian race, and before they branched off into the two peninsulas which they have rendered illustrious. The Sanscrit sūnā, Gothic sunus, and Lithuanian sunus, as well as the received derivation of the Saxons as Saca-sunus, "sons of the Sacæ," point to a very ancient time when this was the common expression for sonship. The word is derived from su or suī, "to beget," which is as much older than φύω or fi as suēhrs is than fera. So that the more recent contact of the Greeks and Italians is proved by the contrasts of the two sets of affinities. When, however, all the terms of a class are the same in the different languages, we are entitled to infer that the objects designated had a distinctive value in the earliest days of the Arian race; and if we can discover their etymology and primitive meaning, we are sometimes led to very interesting conclusions, which place the everyday life of our common ancestors before our eyes in the most vivid pictures. Thus every one of the Indo-Germanic languages, except the Latin, has the same word for "daughter,"—namely, some variety of our English term: Sanscrit, dūhitār; Zend, dūghdar; Slavonic, dukte; Irish, dear; Greek, βυδάτηρ; Gothic, dauhtar. And the etymology of the Sanscrit word from dūh, "to milk," paints the simplicity of a pastoral age when the daughter of the house was most naturally utilized as the milk-maid of the kine. Similarly, the "brother" bears our English name in every language of the family,—namely, Sanscrit, bhrātar; Zend, brāta; Slavonic, brat; Irish, brathair; Greek, φρατήρ; Latin, frater; Gothic, brōthar. And though the common Greek word to express this relationship is ἀδελφός "from the same womb," the use of φρατήρ to denote one of a more general fraternity, for the purpose of mutual assistance, is in more strict accordance with the original signification of the Sanscrit word, i.e., "the bearer" or "helper" (root bhrī, fero), which points to the mutual relations of the brothers in a primitive community. Although it is clear, from their linguistic records, that these primitive Arians recognised the sanctity of domestic relations; although they honoured the marriage tie in its only true form, that of monogamy, and had names for all the affinities which spring from that contract; and though there is every reason to believe that they were acquainted not only with domestic life and the domestication of animals, but even with navigation and the use of the oar (for we have the Sanscrit naus and aritrām, corresponding to the Greek and Latin nāus, naxis, ἱπποῖς, remis), the fact that they have only one common name for grain (jaua, which means "spelt" and "barley" in Sanscrit; jauai, the Lithuanian name for "corn" in general; and zēdā, which means "spelt" in particular), and the absence of any designation for agricultural implements, have been considered sufficient to justify the inference, that the Indo-Germanic tribes had not, at the time when they were still aggregated in Iran, passed from the pastoral to the agricultural mode of life. On the other hand, we see that the European branches of the family, before they separated into the Slavonic, Teutonic, and Graeco-Latin tribes, had made this further advance in civilization; and Mommsen has justly inferred from a number of specific facts that

"the transition from a pastoral to an agricultural life, or, to speak more accurately, the combination of an agricultural with the more ancient pastoral economy, must have taken place after the Indians had separated themselves from the maternal bosom of the nations, but before the Hellenes and the Italians had become distinct peoples. Moreover, when these latter first began to practise tillage, they seem to have been united with other members of the great family; at least, it is a fact that the most important of those agricultural terms, though strange to the Asiatic members of the Indo-Germanic family, are common to the Roman and Greek, with the Teutonic, Slavonic, Lithuanic, and even Celtic tribes." (History of Rome, Introduction, pp. 16, 17, Robertson's translation.)

With this brief notice of its latest and most important application, we must leave the subject of comparative philology. Before, however, we bring this paper to a close, it will be desirable that we should look back on the whole field which we have rapidly surveyed, and endeavour to indicate the place which philology, as a distinct science, is entitled to occupy in the encyclopaedia of human knowledge.

Considered in its full compass, and in all the developments which belong to its definition as the methodical study of language with reference, in the first instance, to some fixed and ancient literature, philology may justly claim the following important functions:—

1. (1.) It forms the necessary basis of a liberal education in all countries which have been brought to regard their present position from the standing-point of universal history.
2. (2.) It is an important branch of inductive science.
3. (3.) It links together the present and the past, and enables those who would otherwise be bound down by the conditions and exigencies of every-day life, to cultivate their spiritual nature by more genial aspirations and a more comprehensive view of their own duties and destiny.
4. (4.) It rectifies ancient traditions, when, being erroneous or wrongly interpreted, they exercise a mischievous influence on the belief and practice of a generation.
5. (5.) It forms the key-stone of theology, wherever the knowledge of divine truth professes to rest on a rational interpretation of the documents of religious history.

We will make a few remarks on each of these subjects.

1. (1.) The proper idea of education, as distinguished from the mere acquisition of information or the amassing of the necessary stores of knowledge, includes the complete and progressive training of the individual, both mentally and morally. With the latter the science of language is indirectly concerned, because it is through the reason that the teacher acts on the will of his pupils, and because the first lessons of duty are always presented in a form which requires more or less of progressive interpretation. With respect, however, to mental or intellectual culture, philology in its elementary applications becomes of paramount importance. On this subject we have only to repeat the language which we have used on former occasions, and to maintain that the discipline of the mind depends entirely on that system of logical training, which gradually imparts the habit of methodically arranging our thoughts, and exercises the reasoning faculties in the practical processes of deduction. Intellectual education cannot advance beyond this; and educational training will undertake what does not belong to its own province if it does not confine itself to the cultivation and improvement of deductive habits. As far as the world has hitherto advanced, only two forms, under which this instruction is possible, have been excogitated or practised by man,—namely, grammar, which deals with the expression of our thoughts in language; and geometry, which applies the rules of language to a methodical discussion of quantities, magnitudes, and proportions, or, in Kant's phraseology, to a development of the intuitions of space and time. Practically, the higher education of Europe, since the days when Plato

Comparative Philology. first discovered and stated the leading principles of Greek syntax, has rested upon this basis and no other. That great philosopher, in whose view dialectics, or the method of language, was the primary science, is reported to have warned those who were unskilled in the geometry, lately brought to perfection by his friends Theodorus and Theaetetus, not to enter the sacred precincts of his Academy. And, however, disguised in technical terminology, this has been the maxim of university training both in the middle ages and in modern times. We have already said that the Trivium and Quadrivium of the mediaeval school of arts constituted the original department in the university of Paris and the similar institutions which followed in its wake; and these seven liberal arts,—namely, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, for the Trivium; and music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, for the Quadrivium,—are represented respectively by the classics and mathematics of modern schools and colleges. It is true that, while the intimate connection of the latter with many branches of practical and professional life have shielded the study of mathematics from any formal attack on the part of those who take a utilitarian view of education, there has been a great outcry in some quarters against the importance assigned to philology, or rather to classical philology, in the higher education of Great Britain; and there are many persons who think that such studies are an anachronism, and that the time bestowed upon them would be better employed in learning modern and living languages, and in becoming well acquainted with the noble literature of our own country. It is not our business on the present occasion to enter into an argument on this subject, which we have sufficiently discussed elsewhere (Classical Scholarship and Classical Learning, Cambridge, 1856). But we must remark here, that no modern language, when acquired in the only way in which it can be learned completely,—namely, by a prolonged and generally an early residence in the country where it is spoken,—can furnish the means of that true grammatical training which is the first step in the formation of deductive habits; and that the literature of England and other modern countries rests so entirely on the wisdom of the ancients that it cannot be fully appreciated, and its most illustrious specimens can scarcely be understood, except by those who have made some acquaintance with the dead languages but immortal writings of Greece and Rome. And therefore philology, which, according to its definition, recognises its primary object in some language and literature in a fixed, if not unalterable form, and which, by the conditions of modern civilization, finds its scope and materials in idioms and in books which have become either classical or sacred, cannot really be divorced from the intellectual education of modern times without serious detriment to one great branch of deductive training,—namely, the study of language, on its own account, and for the sake of the mental discipline which it involves.

(2.) It is an important branch of inductive science. (2.) As a branch of inductive science, philology, in that final development which we call comparative philology, stands on precisely the same footing as geology and those other sciences which are "connected by this bond, that they endeavour to ascend to a past state of things by the aid of the evidence of the present" (Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, vol. iii., p. 481); for, as it has been well observed, "language is one of the most clear and imperishable records of the early events in the career of the human race" (Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. i., p. 650). We have already seen how comparative philology enables us to classify the races and languages of man, and how it sets before us, with unmistakable veracity, the primeval history of Indo-Germanic civilization. Its claim, however, to rank as a branch of inductive science, does not rest merely on its services in classifying the phenomena and interpreting the facts of language. It has

also proved itself able to discover, like other inductive sciences, the general laws which prevail among the phenomena. One of the most important of these general laws is that of the "transposition of sounds" (Lautverschiebung), or, as it is sometimes called, "the law of the interchange of the mutes," which had been imperfectly indicated by Rask, and which Grimm demonstrated completely in its application to the Greek (Latin, Sanscrit), the Gothic, and the Old High German (Deutsche Grammatik, vol. i., pp. 584, sqq.), and which Bopp has extended to the Zend and Lithuanian (Vergleichende Grammatik, pp. 78, foll.) The general law is thus stated:—

Or thus:—

One example of each interchange will explain the application of this law.

Mr Winning has pointed out a curious interchange between the Greek and the Gothic, with regard to the relations established by this law (Manual of Comparative Philology, p. 111). Other modifications require to be introduced. And Dr Guest attaches so much weight to the exceptions which he has noticed, that he has arrived at a conviction of "the general unsoundness of these celebrated canons" ("On the Elements of Language, their Arrangements and their Accidents," Proceedings of the Philological Society, vol. iii., p. 180). The great majority of philologists, however, acquiesce in the general validity of this theorem of interchange: Bunsen calls it "one of the most fertile and triumphant discoveries of philological ethnology" (Report of the British Association for 1847, p. 262); and Max Müller accepts it as a proof of "the systematic regularity—the almost absolute certainty—to which the phonetic laws of different languages can be brought" (Edinburgh Review, October 1851, p. 319). The present writer ventures to attach a somewhat similar importance to his own discovery of another principle, which he proposes to call "the law of divergent articulations." Grimm's law of transposition applies only to the interchange of mutes of the same

order, as far as the mode of their articulation is concerned, but distinguished as tenues, aspirates, and medials. For the interchanges of muts with others belonging to different organs, he had no explanation to offer, and regards them merely as exceptions to the general rule (Deutsche Grammatik, i., p. 589). The older grammarians had only one name, metalepsis, for all interchanges, whether regular and easily explicable, as from P to B, or irregular, and at first sight inexplicable, as from P to K. The present writer was led to an explanation of these divergent interchanges by an inquiry into the nature of the Greek letter called the digamma, which he proved to be a complex sound, consisting of a guttural combined with a labial (New Cratylus, § 110), and he extended the same principle to all cases in which two words, undoubtedly of the same origin, exhibit articulations which could not have been interchanged. In all such cases, he concluded that the original form exhibited a combination of the two sounds. The brief but decisive induction by which this law was established in 1839 (New Cratylus, 1st edit., p. 136) was greatly extended by Mr Garrett in his valuable paper "On Certain Initial Letter-Changes in the Indo-European Languages" (Proceedings of the Philological Society for 1846, vol. ii., p. 233, seq.). A simple example or two will show the application of this law. The Sanscrit paktas corresponds exactly in meaning to the Latin coetus and the Greek πᾶς. But as p cannot pass into k, the Latin differs from the Sanscrit in the initial, and from the Greek in the included sound, or, in Grimm's useful terminology, they differ reciprocally in Anlaut and Inlaut. Now the Latin coetus shows us that the guttural in this case was not pure, but that it was followed by a vocalized labial; and it is known that even in Cicero's time coetus was pronounced quocetus. (Quintil. Inst. Or. vi. 3, § 47.) The divergent articulations P and K converge, therefore, in the compound sound QV = KP, and the three words are accordingly reducible to an identity of origin as well as of meaning. Again, we have in Greek κλαυός as a synonym of μλας, μλαυς, μλας; and with the exception of the initial or Anlaut, the words are identical in root or crude form. But we cannot derive κ from μ, or vice versa; and, according to the law, we must assume the complex sound κρ as the origin of these divergent articulations. Fortunately we are not left to an inference in this case, for Pamphilus, of the school of Aristarchus, recorded the fact, that μλαβρα, meaning "the rafters blackened by the smoke," were anciently called κρλαβρα. (Etymol. Magna, p. 521, 33.) Lastly, to take an instance in which we have all forms of the process, the Latin views exhibits no traces of a guttural in combination with the labial. But the perfect vixi, from the corresponding verb viro, shows that the Inlaut at least involved a k-sound; whereas a comparison with the Gothic quies = views, indicates that qe was also the original type of the Anlaut, or initial articulation; and thus we arrive with perfect confidence at the conclusion, that views = quicetus was ultimately identical in meaning, as it is in signification, with the Old Norse quikr, Old Saxon quic, and modern English quick.

(3.) It re-
leaves the
mind from
the thral-
dom of the
present.

(3.) If the science of philology had not existed, or had been irrecoverably lost at some early period, there must have been a total disruption of those nobler associations which connect the present with the past, and prevent civilized men from becoming the bond-slaves of their everyday requirements and exigencies. It may seem, to those who have not reflected on the subject, something like a paradox to assert that those who have forgotten the past very rarely bestow much thought upon the future. But this is really the condition of human nature. All belief in the future destiny of man necessarily connects itself with a belief in the facts of his past history. Without the latter the former is impossible; for the future is in our minds only the anticipated copy of our recorded experiences.

Without this we have no future beyond the idea of proximate coming time; and he who has no past but "yesterday," has no future but "to-morrow":—

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterday's have lighted fools
To dusty death.

The very structure of inflected language shows us that we cannot measure futurity beyond the vague statement that it is near and coming; whereas the past, so far as it is registered, stretches back in a lengthening vista, and is, by the mere expression of tense in the oldest languages of our family, declared to be distant. From a contemplation of this remote period, as it is unfolded in ancient history, not only does the present sink to its proper littleness as a mere fleeting unit in the onward progress of the seasons, but the future assumes new and larger proportions in the analogy of the past, till at last it expands in the eyes of faith, or it may be of imagination, into the grand conception of eternity. Dr Johnson, then, has said with great truth (Journey to the Western Isles, Works, x., p. 501),—"Whatever withdraws us from the power of the senses,—whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present,—advances us in the dignity of thinking beings." Now it cannot be doubted that the schools of philology, of which we have briefly traced the history in this paper, have alone preserved the records of the past life of man, and enabled the present and future ages to read and understand them. To the critical editorship, which commenced at Athens under the Pisistratidae, and culminated at Alexandria under the Ptolemies, we owe all that we have of ancient Greek literature, the greatest inheritance of genius and wisdom, and the most influential instrument of liberal culture, that the world has ever possessed. The Jews, stimulated perhaps in part, and certainly guided in no small degree by the school of Alexandria, have preserved and transmitted to us a collection of sacred writings which still preaches to the civilized world the highest lessons of religious faith and divine morality, and breathes forth a spirit of prayer that ascends to heaven like the incense of the sacrifice. The Indians, by a very similar but independent effort, made, perhaps, under the intrusive pressure of Buddhism, have rescued from oblivion and placed on record the relics of their own primitive language and writings, which have enabled us to penetrate to the untold beginnings of Arian civilization, and to discover what the Indo-Germanic race did and believed before it was broken up into distinct nationalities, and scattered over the face of Asia and Europe. The labours of philologists, during the three centuries which have elapsed since the revival of literature and learning, have rendered all these early efforts to preserve the documents of ancient culture available for the purposes of modern speculation. The hieroglyphic annals of Egypt, and the arrow-headed inscriptions of Persia and Assyria, have been, in part at least, deciphered and interpreted. The languages called classical, and those of the Jews and Indians, have been analysed so thoroughly that little, if anything, remains to be done for their elucidation. Historical criticism and comparative grammar have corrected the mistakes of a credulous age, and have raised etymology from guess-work to science; and ethnography, which treats of the origin and growth of man, has been placed, by the aid of the philologist, on a basis as strong as that of physical science. With all these fields of research open to his view,—with these means of connecting himself with the past history of his species, and of basing his future hopes on manifold revelations,—educated men must blame themselves if they yield to the degrading thralldom of their present needs and enjoyments, and make themselves tools for the execution of some daily work.

(4.) Valuable as the records of the past necessarily are, when read with that discriminating judgment which it is the business of philology to cultivate, their possession and use may, without this organon, lead to the most superstitious belief and the most criminal practices. This is especially the case in regard to branches of literature which have become sacred rather than classical. In the interpretation of these records of authoritative tradition it is often found that, so long as they remain in the sole custody of a sacerdotal caste, they are liable to be distorted and misread until they are made to say something quite inconsistent with their true meaning. And it is only when the scholar steps in with his matured and independent knowledge that the mistaken tradition is rectified, and the genuine statement re-invested with an articulate utterance. Thus, to take two most important instances from the sacred writings of the Hindus:—The Brahmins profess to derive the multitudinous practices which they enjoin from the infallible revelations of their Védas. The great majority of these ordinances, although childish and absurd in our eyes, have been wisely tolerated by the British government since it became paramount in India. But there was one practice so offensive, not only to morality, but even to humanity, that steps were necessarily taken to do away with it. This was the suttee, or compulsory immolation of the widow on her deceased husband's funeral pile. At the time when Christian feeling broke out into open revolt against this monstrous usage, it was supposed that the Brahmins had at least the excuse of believing that the practice of widow-burning was expressly enjoined in the oldest books of their religion; and even the great Sanscrit scholar Colebrooke had translated a passage from the Rig-Véda in accordance with their interpretation of it (Asiatic Researches, vol. iv., pp. 209-219, Calcutta, 1795). But when the Védas were at length studied according to the principles of philological criticism as established in Europe, it was found that the sacred book, instead of countenancing the murderous custom, in the passage immediately before that which the Brahmins quoted as sanctioning it, said,—“Rise up, woman; come to the world of life; thou sleepest nigh unto him whose life is gone. Come to us.” And that in the text cited by the Védolaters they had changed “A rohantu janayo yonim agre” (“The mothers may go first to the altar”), into “A rohantu janayo yonim agneh” (“Let the mothers pass into the womb of fire”). (See Max Müller, in the Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesells., vol. ix., part 4, p. xxv.; and in the Oxford Essays for 1856, pp. 22, 25.) If this discovery had been made only fifty years earlier, many innocent women would have been saved from a cruel death, and we should have escaped the risk of a religious outbreak, which we incurred when we put a stop to this mock martyrdom. Again, the dreadful mutinies which have raged in so large a part of our Indian dominions are attributed immediately to the apprehensions on the part of the Brahminical sepoys that the government intended to interfere with their sacred distinction of caste. In this case, also, philology has proved that the supposed religious sanction is not to be found in the sacred books. “If,” says a learned and able writer, who is easily identified as perhaps the best authority on the subject (Times, 10th April 1858), “with all the documents before us, we ask the question, Does caste, as we find it in Manu, and at the present day, form part of the religious teaching of the Védas? We can answer with a decided No. There is no authority whatever in the Védas for the complicated system of castes; no authority for the offensive privileges claimed by the Brahmins; no authority for the degraded position of the Súdras. There is no authority to prevent the different classes of the people from living together, from eating and drinking together; no law to prohibit the marriage of people belonging to different castes; no law to brand

the offspring of such marriages with an indelible stigma.” And he justly adds that, “As the case now stands, the government would be perfectly justified in declaring that it will no longer consider caste as part of the religious system of the Hindus. Caste, in the modern sense of the term, is no religious institution; it has no authority in the sacred writings of the Brahmins; and, by whatever promise the government may have bound itself to respect the religion of the natives, that promise will not be violated even though penalties were inflicted for the observation of the rules of caste.” The evils which have resulted from this misapprehension on the part of the Hindu priests, or rather from the traditions with which they have overlaid and nullified the sacred books, and so substituted a new authority for that which should alone be paramount, have been remedied by a vigorous exertion of our military power; but it is clear that an ultimate pacification on this and other kindred subjects will be greatly facilitated when the spirit of modern philology, applied to the Védas and Puranas, shall have finally superseded the half-knowledge of the native pundits.

(5.) In much the same manner as the sacerdotal caste in India have substituted a traditional system of their own for that of the sacred writings on which they profess to rely, the priests of the Latin Church in the middle ages had superseded the Scriptures by an elaborate system of theology, and by the recognition of a visible head, whose decisions on questions of doctrine and practice were held to be infallible. The rectification of this erroneous tradition was called Protestantism; and it was due in a great measure to the revival of philological learning, which preceded it, and which has been briefly described in these pages. Indeed, it may be asserted with perfect truth, that the whole fabric of papal pretensions rested on precarious deductions from a philological blunder or oversight,—namely, the supposition or statement that πέτρα, a stone, was exactly synonymous with πέρα, a rock,—that is, a mass or collection of similar stones. But although freedom of opinion achieved this partial victory in the sixteenth century, the necessity for an energetic exertion of Protestant principles has never ceased; and it is as urgent now as it was in the days of Luther and Melanchthon. Roman pretensions are not extinct; and the traditions of the Italian church are not the only adscititious envelopments which mar the beauty of the Christian revelation. Among Protestants themselves there are still traditions of infallibility, as degrading to the intellect of man, as prejudicial to true religion, and as untenable in themselves, as those which were put forth to support the dogma of transubstantiation or the practice of indulgences. For every individual Protestant now, as for Protestants in general at the time of the great Reformation, the significant saying of Zschokke (Autobiography, p. 29) contains at once a caution and a rule of action:—“He who does not like living in the furnished lodgings of tradition must build his own house, his own system of thought and faith, for himself.” And it would be the greatest mistake to suppose that the duty of study and examination in a Protestant community devolves exclusively on the clergy or ministry. The laity cannot thus shift their responsibility in a matter which concerns themselves individually, and in which the general diffusion of education has made them quite as competent judges, while they are also more unprejudiced arbiters, and more free to express their convictions, than most of their authorized teachers. On this subject we need only refer to a temperate and well-considered argument which has just appeared from the pen, as we are informed, of a person who has won a distinguished place in Indian philology (Free Theological Inquiry the Duty of the Laity, by a Lay Member of the Church of England, London and Edinburgh, 1858; see p. 13). But for all Protestants, whether ministers or members of congregations, it is certain