48 PROCEEDINGS OP THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



by the attraction of the collections of Oriental manuscripts in the great 

 library. Paris was then incontestably the centre of Oriental study for 

 Europe ; even a little school of Sanskrit philology had arisen there, 

 having for its first teacher Alexander Hamilton, an English East-In- 

 dian, one of Napoleon's prisoners after the breach of the peace of Amiens. 

 To the study of the Sanskrit, and to the comparison of Indo-European 

 languages to which it so naturally led, Bopp soon began especially to 

 devote himself, — a devotion which he was never to relax until stricken 

 down by his last illness. More than any other person, he aided to make 

 the Sanskrit accessible to European scholars, by a series of grammars, 

 texts, and glossaries, which, though they have their defects, are even 

 now among the most valuable parts of the apparatus of study within 

 reach of the learner. With him, however, the Sanskrit was the thing of 

 subordinate consequence, the handmaid of comparative philology ; into 

 the history, antiquities, and literature of India he never cared to pene- 

 trate very far, nor did he strive to become a profound Sanskrit scholar, 

 to master all the niceties of its structure and usages. Even before 

 leaving Paris for a further season of study in England, he prepared 

 and published, in 1816, the forerunner of his great Comparative Gram- 

 mar, a little volume entitled " The Conjugation-System of the Sanskrit 

 Language, in comparison with that of the Greek, the Latin, the Per- 

 sian, and the German Languages." In this he sketches the principal 

 features of his whole system, as afterwards developed. He assumes 

 as demonstrated the truth, pointed out by many before him, of the re- 

 lationship of the Sanskrit with the other tongues named, not as their 

 mother, but as their older sister, but in the use he makes of this truth 

 he had no predecessor; he would fain derive from their comparison 

 their history and the genesis of their words and forms. He takes up 

 their grammatical mechanism as an object in itself worthy of study, 

 and sure to lead, when comprehended, to valuable results for other de- 

 partments of knowledge. Both in his distinct apprehension of the 

 work to be done, and in the clearness, good sense, and acuteness 

 of the methods of research he devised and employed, in the geniality 

 and fruitfulness of his whole mode of labor, he so far surpassed all who 

 had gone before him, and furnished an example and model for those 

 who should come after him, as to become the founder of the science. 

 It is, then, not without reason, that the fiftieth anniversary of the date 

 affixed to the preface of the " Conjugation-System " was celebrated just 

 two years ago (May 16, 1868) in Berlin, as the jubilee of Comparative 



