OF ARTS AND SCIENCES: MAY 24, 1864. 315 



Gervinus and Dahlmann, was banished from the country. After four 

 years spent in retirement at Cassel, he was called to Berlin in 1841, 

 as Member of the Academy, with the privilege of lecturing in the Uni- 

 versity. In these changes of residence and service, he was accom- 

 panied by his brother Wilhelm, who was but one year younger than he, 

 and who shared, though with a less vigorous and ardent nature, in the 

 same studies and pursuits. A few years after coming to Berlin, they 

 commenced in common the gigantic undertaking of a German Diction- 

 ary, to contain all words found in German literature since the era of 

 the Reformation, with definitions and copious citations. 



"While they were engaged in this work, Wilhelm Grimm, after a 

 few months of declining health, died, December 16, 1859: he was 

 commemorated by his brother in a pathetic address delivered before 

 the Berlin Academy. For nearly four years longer, Jacob Grimm 

 continued to work on by himself, in an old age of more than seventy- 

 five years, but with hardly any abatement of activity and power. At 

 length the call of death came unexpectedly : a stroke of apoplexy ter- 

 minated his honorable and useful life, September 20, 1863, in the 

 seventy-ninth year of his age. 



In the scientific career of Grimm we may trace the patriotic reaction 

 caused in the mind of Germany by the conquests of Napoleon. His 

 studies and labors were comprehensive and multifarious ; but Germany 

 was the centi'e of them all. It was not, however, Germany in the 

 narrow sense that engaged his attention : his interest extended to all 

 sections and members of the Germanic race. They are all represented 

 in what we must regard as the great work of his life, the " Deutsche 

 Grammatik," of which the first volume was pubhshed in 1819, and the 

 fourth in 1837 ; a fifth, which was to complete his plan, never appeared. 

 It is a work of prodigious research, containing an immense amount of 

 scientific material, which had to be collected by the author himself, 

 with scanty help from previous laborers in the field. It is no less dis- 

 tinguished for the originality and boldness of its conception. No scholar 

 had before produced a comparative grammar, embracing a number of 

 related languages, and showing how the same primitive scheme of 

 inflection and structure presents itself in each. It is difficult to over- 

 estimate the acuteness and sagacity which enabled Grimm to trace out 

 a unitary system amid the seeming irregularity and confusion of the 

 phenomena he had to deal with. In his " Geschichte der Deutschen 

 Sprache" (2 vols., 1848), the lights of philology are used to explore 



