CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY 209 



and sensitive literary appreciation. The combination 

 of these qualities in classical investigation is as important 

 as it is rare. 



The rise in France of the modern scientific spirit in 

 Latin studies is due in good part (not to speak of scholars 

 happily still living) to THUROT, who earnestly advocated 

 the double ideal of literary appreciation and scientific 

 method; to BENOIST, who urged the return to manu- 

 scripts in constituting a text, as against the acceptance 

 of tradition; to WEIL, whose doctorate dissertation on 

 the order of words in the ancient languages (1844) 

 inaugurates the scientific study of the subject; and to a 

 group of men of high achievement whose names bring 

 us to the present century. Among these, special men- 

 tion may be made of RIEMANN, syntacticist (whose 

 premature death cannot be too much regretted) ; DELISLE, 

 whose researches in palaeography and the history of 

 mediaeval libraries have contributed greatly to our 

 knowledge of the preservation and transmission of 

 Latin texts; BREAL, comparative philologist, with a 

 wide range in Latin philology, including the dialects, 

 and the science of semantics, which he established and 

 named; Victor HENRY, comparative philologist; ANTOINE, 

 syntacticist; Emile JACOB, editor; DAREMBERG, who pro- 

 jected the " Dictionnaire des Antiquites grecques et 

 romaines"; and SAGLIO, who was for many years its 

 editor. 



Among living workers now in retirement, Max BONNET 

 demands special notice for his exhaustive book (1890) 

 on the Latin of Gregory of Tours, important alike for 

 Latin in its decadence and for the Romance languages 

 in their origins; and for his study of the principal Paris 

 manuscript of Catullus (1871), a work performed with 

 a penetration and accuracy which were very rare at the 

 time, and are not common now. And mention should 



