Sir William Jones and his successors 515 



of the country in which he was living. He was mainly instrumental 

 in establishing a society for the investigation of language and related 

 subjects. He was himself the first president of the society, and in 

 the "third anniversary discourse" delivered on February 2, 1786, he 

 made the following observations: "The Sanscrit language, whatever 

 be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure ; more perfect than the 

 Grreek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined 

 than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in 

 the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly 

 have been produced by accident ; so strong indeed, that no philologer 

 could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung 

 from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists : there is 

 a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both 

 the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different 

 idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian 

 might be added to the same family, if this was the place for dis- 

 cussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia 1 ." 



No such epoch-making discovery was probably ever announced 

 with less flourish of trumpets. Though Sir William Jones lived 

 for eight years more and delivered other anniversary discourses, he 

 added nothing of importance to this utterance. He had neither the 

 time nor the health that was needed for the prosecution of so 

 arduous an undertaking. 



But the good seed did not fall upon stony ground. The news 

 was speedily conveyed to Europe. By a happy chance, the sudden 

 renewal of war between France and England in 1803 gave Friedrich 

 Schlegel the opportunity of learning Sanscrit from Alexander 

 Hamilton, an Englishman who, like many others, was confined in 

 Paris during the long struggle with Napoleon. The influence of 

 Schlegel was not altogether for good in the history of this re- 

 search, but he was inspiring. Not upon him but upon Franz Bopp, 

 a struggling German student who spent some time in Paris and 

 London a dozen years later, fell the mantle of Sir William Jones. 

 In Bopp's Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic languages 

 which appeared in 1833, three-quarters of a century ago, the 

 foundations of Comparative Philology were laid. Since that day 

 the literature of the subject has grown till it is almost, if not 

 altogether, beyond the power of any single man to cope with it. 

 But long as the discourse may be, it is but the elaboration of the 

 text that Sir William Jones supplied. 



With the publication of Bopp's Comparative Grammar the 

 historical study of language was put upon a stable footing. Need- 

 less to say much remained to be done, much still remains to be 



1 Asiatic Researches, i. p. 422, Works of Sir W. Jones, i. p. 26, London, 1799. 



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