GROWTH AND DIFFUSION OF CRITICAL SPIRIT. 147 



the circle of studies — which Ritschl and others viewed 

 not without apprehension that the method might suffer 

 — was assisted by the much larger circle of interests 

 which from the beginning characterised the programme 

 of F. A. Wolf. The multitude of problems involved 

 in the vast study of antiquity, which embraced archae- 

 ology, history of ancient art, palaeography, the study 

 of ancient commerce, industry, and administration, &c., 

 counteracted in many instances that concentration of 

 talent and ingenuity upon which the older criticism 

 of texts prided itself so much. The enormous material 

 had a tendency to lead to that kind of erudition which 

 was represented in earlier ages by the great French 

 school of philologists of which Joseph Justus Scaliger 

 (1540-1609) was considered the most prominent 

 representative, but it also encouraged premature 

 generalisations with the legitimate desire to grasp the 

 vast material and to bring some kind of unity into 

 studies which would otherwise have fallen asunder. A 

 similar influence came from an entirely different quarter, 

 mainly through the growth of comparative philology. 

 This can be said to take its beginning with the introduc- 

 tion of the study of Sanscrit. It is marked by the 

 appearance, in the year 1816, of F. Bopp's work, 'On ss. 

 the System of Conjugation of Sanscrit compared with Grimm, 

 that of the Greek, Latin, Persian, and Germanic 

 Languages.' In the year 1819 Jacob Grimm published 

 at Gottingen the first part of his German Grammar. 

 A. F. Pott's etymological researches followed in 1833, 

 Benfey's Grecian Root-lexicon in 1839. But the first 

 to utilise these researches for the purposes of class- 



