Nov. 23, 1876] 



NATURE 



75 



other great founders of Comparative Philology had been 

 too busily engaged in laying the foundations of the 

 science, in determining its main laws and principles, and 

 in classifying whole groups or families of speech, to 

 devote themselves to the minute and special investigation 

 of single languages, and trace therein the application and 

 action of the laws they had formulated. But a time came 

 when the work of the pioneer was finished, and when it 

 was necessary for special scholars to elaborate the details 

 of the new science and to strengthen or modify its con- 

 clusions by a patient examination of individual dialects. 

 The old-fashioned "philology" which had professed to 

 analyse the forms of a language, as preserved in its litera- 

 ture, had proceeded upon a wrong method and had 

 accordingly arrived at wrong results ; its area of com- 

 parison was too narrow and limited, its procedure was 

 capricious and at haphazard, and its doctrines were based 

 rather upon individual taste than upon inductive reason- 

 ing. When it was discovered, however, that language is 

 as much subject to the action of invariable laws as the 

 bodily frame of man, that every sound in the words we 

 utter is due to conditions which can be accurately gauged 

 and determined, the "philology" of the last century 

 underwent a complete change. It stands to the modern 

 science of language in much the same relation as 

 alchemy stands to chemistry. The general laws of lan- 

 guage which had been obtained by a careful and far- 

 reaching comparison of phenomena, were applied to 

 explain and illuminate the facts presented by special 

 languages, and these in their turn served to confirm or 

 modify the generalisations already made. 



Latin and Greek w-ere naturally among the first to 

 benefit by the new method of treatment. Thanks to the 

 labours of scholars like Curtius and Corssen, the lan- 

 guages of ancient Greece and Rom.e have been placed in 

 their true position, and probed, as it were, to their very 

 roots. Their grammatical forms have been explained 

 and simplified, their words have been traced back to an 

 epoch when they were the common heritage of the Aryan 

 race, and their phonetic characteristics have been made 

 to yield fresh testimony to the truth that the place and 

 nature of every consonant and vowel is the result of the 

 working of undeviating laws. What, perhaps, is of still 

 greater importance, is the line that has been drawn 

 between the literary and the linguistic value of the two 

 classical tongues. For purely philological purposes they 

 are of less interest than many a savage jargon, the name 

 of which is almost unknown, and certainly than those 

 spoken languages of modern Europe whose life and 

 growth can be watched like that of the living organism, 

 and whose phonology can be studied at first hand. The 

 more or le£S artificial dialect of a literary class stands 

 outside the ever-moving current of living speech; in pro- 

 portion as it is impressed with the individualism of par- 

 ticular writers, it becomes unsuitable for scientific treat- 

 ment. The greater the literary perfection of a language, 

 the less is its importance to the mere glottologist. The 

 value of Latin and Greek, and more especially of Latin, 

 lies rather in the literature they enshrine than in the 

 linguistic features they present. 



No language, however, can be wholly valueless or un- 

 interesting to the student of human speech, and Latin 

 and Greek, from the minuteness with which they have 



been studied, and the number and variety of monuments 

 they have left behind them, have a special claim upon 

 his attention when revivified and illuminated by scientific 

 philology. The laws which have been ascertained by the 

 observation of living utterance have been applied to ex- 

 plain the letter-changes of the classical tongues, and the 

 comparison of their grammatical forms with those of the 

 cognate languages has done much towards throwing light 

 on the history of Aryan flexion and the vicissitudes through 

 which it has passed. The innermost structure of the 

 dead languages of Greece and Rome has been laid bare, 

 and though there is much which will to the last resist 

 analysis, the old mystery which enveloped the para- 

 digms and " rules " of our school grammars has been dis- 

 pelled for ever. Dr. Baur's attempt to convey the results 

 of a scientific investigation of Greek and Latin in the 

 shortest possible form is highly successful, and those 

 who are unable to read German ought to be grateful for 

 the translation of the work. The book is essentially a 

 useful one, and we hope it will be extensively read in our 

 schools and universities. As the author confines himself 

 very strictly to the two classical languages, the teacher 

 need have no fear of the pupil's mind being confused by 

 a reference to less-known tongues. Indeed the book 

 suffers from a neglect of Sanskrit, with which Dr. Baur 

 does not seem to be acquainted. He has compiled the 

 work, however, with German care and thoroughness, 

 though, as is inevitable in a work of the kind, exception 

 might be taken to some of his statements. 



Thus no distinction is made between primitive Aryan 

 kw and k, and the two sounds are accordingly confounded 

 together in Greek and Latin words. Quies, for instance, 

 can have no connection with the Greek Kfifiai, Kw/iT], the 

 English home, the Sanskrit 'si, but must go back to a dif- 

 ferent root. So again it is very questionable whether the 

 characteristic r of the Latin passive is really the reflexive 

 pronoun se. In Old Bulgarian, it is true, we have divlya 

 sc, divisi se, " I admire myself," "thou admirest thyself," 

 and in Lithuanian dyvyju-s " I admire myself ; " but the 

 Old Irish characteristic of the passive is also r, and in 

 Old Irish r cannot be derived from an earlier s. 



A. H. Sayce 



OUR BOOK SHELF 



A Monograph of the Geometrid Moths or Phalanida of 

 the United States (Tenth Report of the United States 

 Geological Survey of the Territories). By A. S. 

 Packard, Jun., M.D. (Washington, 1876.) 



This is without question the most valuable contribution 

 to the study of the Geometrid Moths which has ever 

 come under our notice. The size of the work, the paper, 

 and the classification of the introductory chapters are all 

 that can be desired ; as for the plates they are simply 

 perfect, no pains having been spared to render them 

 accurate even in the most minute details.^ 



After the Introduction, a chapter is devoted to the 

 History of the Family from the time of Linnaeus, a work 

 demanding no little research, and which consequently 

 must claim for the author the gratitude of all succeeding 

 generations of lepidopterists : the only point in which we 

 disagree with Dr. Packard is as regards the prominence 

 which he gives to the '• Tentamen " of Hiibner, the value 



' To the eye of an amateur the plates would appear overcrowded, but to 

 the workbg entomologist this must be one of thcr greatest merits. 



