PROGRESS DURING LAST CENTURY 23 



the etymology or real meaning of words had been a favorite and 

 mostly bootless exercise of all European grammarians from the Greek 

 philosophers down, having its original animus and more or less con- 

 fessedly its continuing power in the broadly human, though barely 

 on occasion half-formulated conviction, that words and their values 

 by some mysterious tie naturally belong to each other. In the instinct 

 to begin his task Pott was still with the traditions of the Greeks and 

 the Graeco-Europeans, but in developing it he was guided into new 

 paths by two forces that had arisen since the century opened. Under 

 the guidance of the comparative method whereby the vocabularies 

 of demonstrably cognate languages now assumed a determinate rela- 

 tion to each other, he came unavoidably to the recognition of certain 

 normal correspondences of sounds between the different tongues. On 

 the other hand, in almost entire independence hereof, Jakob Grimm 

 in the pursuit of his historical method had formulated the regularities 

 of the mutation of consonants in the Teutonic dialects, and had set 

 them forth in a second edition of the first volume of his grammar, 

 appearing in 1822. In all this was contained a strong encouragement 

 as well as warning to apply these new definite tests to every etymo- 

 logical postulate, and therewith arose, under Pott's hands, the begin- 

 nings of a scientific etymology. It was a first promise of deliverance 

 from a long wilderness of caprice. 



The positivistic attitude which had been gradually infused into 

 language-study under the influence of the Hindoo grammar finally 

 reached its extremest expression in the works of August Schleicher 

 (1821-68). The science of language he treated under the guise of 

 a natural science. Language appeared as isolated from the speaking 

 individual or the speaking community to an extent unparalleled in 

 any of his predecessors or successors, and was viewed as an organism 

 having a life of its own and laws of growth or decline within itself. 

 Following the analogies of the natural sciences and trusting to the 

 inferred laws of growth, he ventured to reconstruct from the scattered 

 data of the cognate Indo-European languages the visible form of 

 the mother speech. His confidence in the character of language as 

 a natural growth made him the first great systematizer and organizer 

 of the materials of Indo-European comparative grammar (Com- 

 pendium der vergleichenden Grammatik, 1861); as confidence in the 

 unerring uniformity of the action of the laws of sound made Karl 

 Brugmann the second (Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik, 

 1886-92). 



It is not by accident that the first one to voice outright the dogma 

 of the absoluteness (Ausnahmslosigkeif) of the laws of sound was 

 a pupil of Schleicher, August Leskien (Die Declination in Slavisch- 

 litauischen und Germanischen, xxvm, 1876). The use of this dogma 

 as a norm and test in the hands of a signally active and gifted body 



