514 



PHILOLOGY. 



the embassy ; the latter, by promising to heal his 

 wound, prevailed upon him to return to Troy. He 

 \\;is cured by Machaon (or ^Esculapius), and after 

 many Trojans, ninong- whom was Paris, had fallen 

 by his arrows, the city was taken. The history of 

 Philoctetes forms the subject of one of the tragedies 

 of Sophocles. 



PHILOLOGY.* This word, among the ancients, 

 had a signification which included what we now call 

 philosophy, literature, the sciences, and the theory 

 of arts, though it excluded their practice. Thus 

 poetry and rhetoric, considered as sciences, came 

 within the description of philology ; but philologists 

 were not expected to be orators or poets. Cicero 

 calls his philosophical works f/xXoyTif*. as oppos- 

 ed to his orations ; the former being written in a 

 didactic or argumentative, the latter in a more ele- 

 gant or artificial style. (Ad Att., xiii. 12.) We 

 are informed by Suetonius (De illustr Gram., c. 10) 

 that Eratosthenes of Cyrene was the first among the 

 Greeks who assumed the name of p/XeAeysf. He 

 was a man of unbounded erudition, a physician, phi- 

 losopher, geographer, grammarian, historian and 

 poet, though we are told that he excelled in none of 

 these branches. (Moreri.) Before his time, a phi- 

 lologer or philologist for both words are used in the 

 English language was called ^a^fiecrixof , which 

 did not mean a grammarian hi the present accepta- 

 tion of the word, but a man of letters ; in which 

 sense literary men were first called at Rome literati, 

 and afterwards, when Greek terminology became 

 fashionable, grammatici and philologi. Philology, 

 then, included in ancient times, with few exceptions, 

 every thing that could be learned (omne scibile). In 

 those days, however, science was circumscribed 

 within much narrower bounds than it is at present. 

 The numerous branches which compose what is now 

 called natural science, were very imperfectly known. 

 The same may be said of geography, astronomy and 

 natural philosophy. All that was known of those 

 sciences, with grammar, rhetoric, scholastic logic, 

 metaphysics and elementary mathematics, formed 

 an aggregate which obtained the name of philology, 

 until long after the destruction of the Roman em- 

 pire ; and that is the sense in which this word is 

 understood in many, if not most of the colleges and 

 universities of Europe, always with reference to an- 

 cient, and not to modern learning ; hence criticism, 

 as applied to the Greek and Roman writers, and the 

 knowledge of ancient coins and medals, and other 

 recondite antiquities, are considered as important 

 branches of philology, and those which chiefly entitle 

 their followers to the name of philologists. This 

 opinion was general as late as the seventeenth cen- 

 tury. At that time the Bentleys, the Scaiigers, the 

 Saumaises, were the philologists par excellence. 

 The dictionary of the French academy defines 

 philology erudition qui embrasse diver ses parties 

 des belles-lettres, et principalement la critique. A 

 century afterwards Johnson denned it criticism, 

 grammatical learning. But of late, the word philo- 

 logy has received a more definite and more appro- 

 priate meaning ; and it seems now, by a tacit, but 

 almost universal consent, to be chiefly, if not exclu- 

 sively, appropriated to that science which embraces 

 human language in its widest extent, analyzes and 

 compares its component parts and its various struc- 

 tures in thousands of idioms and dialects, that are 

 and have been spoken on the face of the habitable 

 globe, and from the whole seeks to draw inferences 

 that may lead to a clearer and more extensive 



* Thi? nrticle oomes from the same learned source with that 

 on Language, and forms a whole with it. The interest of the 

 fcubject, and the originality of tho author's views, are the rea- 

 ton of the space allowed it. 



knowledge than we have hitherto possessed of the 

 history of our species, aud particularly of the migra- 

 tions of different nations, their connexion and inter- 

 course with each other; for language, though 

 perishable, like all other earthly things, is still the 

 most lasting monument of events long since past, 

 and the surest means of transmitting facts through 

 successive generations. When the sounds of a lan- 

 guage have ceased to reverberate, and no longer 

 convey ideas through the human ear, that language 

 still lives in written characters, which speak to the 

 mind through the eyes, and even when the sense or 

 meaning of those characters is lost or forgotten, 

 genius, aided by philology, will, after many ages, 

 revive, at least some fragments, and Champollions 

 will arise, whose labours will perhaps succeed in 

 recovering an ancient language, long considered as 

 not only dead, but profoundly buried in the night of 

 time. A science like this, so wide in its extent, 

 and yet so homogeneous in all its parts, requires an 

 appropriate name, a name familiar to men of science, 

 and such as the learned world will easily be led to 

 adopt. Various denominations have been attempted 

 to be given to it, such as glossography, glossology, 

 and others of the like kind ; but those names have 

 been uniformly rejected. " Philology," says Web- 

 ster, "is that branch of literature which compre- 

 hends a knowledge of the etymology or origin and 

 combination of words, and whatever relates to the 

 history and present state of languages. It some- 

 times includes rhetoric, poetry, history, and anti- 

 quities." Indeed, the word philology has been 

 gradually falling off from its original acceptation, as 

 no longer requisite for the heterogeneous mass of 

 sciences to which it was formerly applied. Litera- 

 ture, criticism, archaeology, philosophy, history, 

 grammar, rhetoric, logic, metaphysics, and all else 

 which once came under this sweeping denomination, 

 have all received specific and appropriate names, 

 and each of them is now too vast and too extensive, 

 and many of them too distant from each other, to 

 allow of their being classed under one general 

 appellation. The word philology, therefore, had 

 become as it were in abeyance, and the science of 

 human language, comprehending all its various 

 divisions and subdivisions, has very properly taken 

 hold of it, and appropriated it to itself with uni- 

 versal consent. Under this impression, we have 

 headed this article Philology, and under it, we shall 

 endeavour to give a general idea of the science 

 which it denominates. 



The science of languages, in its present extent, 

 is of very late date. The ancients (we mean the 

 Greeks and Romans) had, indeed, analyzed, with 

 great judgment, their respective idioms, and reduced 

 them to grammatical systems truly worthy of admira- 

 tion ; but beyond that they did not go. They called 

 every language but their own barbarous, and did not 

 think any other worthy of attention. We have 

 learned nothing from them of the Punic, nor of the 

 ancient Persian, though they were so long at war 

 with the nations that spoke those idioms. Their 

 excessive pride has suffered those idioms to perish, 

 though there is reason to believe that they were 

 both rich in literature of their own. Even of the 

 language of Egypt, where they so long governed, 

 the Romans have told us nothing, and the Greeks 

 very little. How interesting would be, at this day, 

 a Coptic grammar, written by a Roman or Greek 

 grammarian, with some explanation, at least, of 

 their hieroglyphic characters, more satisfactory than 

 what we have received from Herodotus and Clement 

 of Alexandria ! An incomplete translation of the 

 works of Horus Apollo is all that we have, and it 

 has rather increased than dispelled our ignorance of 



