276 GERMANIC LANGUAGES 



The science of comparative linguistics has been drawing steadily 

 away from Bopp's goal and from his method of explaining what he 

 termed the "organism of the Indo-Germanic languages," for it has 

 come to recognize in ever-increasing measure the futility of attempt- 

 ing to solve the problem with the insufficient means at its disposal. 

 To be sure, we owe Bopp an everlasting debt of gratitude for having 

 by his comparisons established definitely and for all time the rela- 

 tionship of the individual Indo-Germanic languages, which had 

 previously been only darkly suspected. And yet if we consider the 

 actual mode of comparison, we shall find the historical method as 

 applied by Grimm to be of far greater significance for future research 

 than Bopp's divinatory mode of procedure, which caused him to 

 advance by leaps and bounds. To whatever extent Grimm's method 

 may have been displaced by stricter present-day requirements in 

 individual instances, we must not forget that it was preeminently 

 he who gave the initial impulse in a number of important points. 

 It was Jakob Grimm who first insisted upon the strictest historical 

 control of all related material, and upon the most complete induction 

 as prerequisite for the comparison of less intimately associated lin- 

 guistic forms and for the consequent reconstruction of primitive 

 Indo-Germanic forms, which is indispensable even at the present 

 day. It is to him we owe the conviction that no material should be 

 compared in a wider circle, unless its history within the individual 

 languages and families of languages has been carefully and un- 

 questionably determined beforehand. It is to him, again, that we are 

 indebted for the gradual development of Indo-Germanic linguistics 

 into a history of the individual families of languages and their sub- 

 divisions. 



For a long time the influence of Indo-Germanic linguistics upon 

 Germanic linguistics was not so prominent as the impulse given by 

 Jakob Grimm to the development of Indo-Germanic linguistics itself, 

 an impulse that in reality goes back to Bopp. In those days, as in 

 the case of Jakob Grimm, Germanic linguistics contributed more than 

 it received in return. To be sure, Grimm was familiar with the in- 

 vestigations of Bopp and his successors in the general Indo-Germanic 

 field, yet he employed their results with a certain reserve, which 

 ended by isolating Germanic grammar, as it were, from comparative 

 Indo-Germanic linguistics. The first generation of Germanic scholars 

 after Grimm and Lachmann seldom overstepped the narrow bounds 

 of their limited subject. This may be attributed, in part at least, to 

 the circumstance that the structure of Germanic grammar as erected 

 by Jakob Grimm seemed to be so firmly established that no necessity 

 was felt for securing additional support from a great distance. The 

 most important consideration, however, was that the pupils of both 

 Grimm and Lachmann were interested in philology rather than in the 



