WILLIAM WATSON GOODWIN. v 



tive home of the Aryans many of the problems that pertained in the 

 first instance to the history of the Greek language on Greek soil. 



It was Goodwin's clarity of judgment — with characteristic mod- 

 esty he called it "common sense" — that saw the truth when the 

 Germans had generally failed to release themselves from the intri- 

 cacies of philosophical abstractions; and with equal sagacity and 

 discernment he refused to trust himself upon the shifting sands of 

 comparative syntax. The metaphysical syntax that held sway when 

 Goodwin began his career is a thing of the past ; but historical syntax^ 

 both in the wider area of the Indo-European languages and on Greek 

 territory, has immeasurably increased its influence as it has steadily- 

 built upon securer foundations. 



The wonder is that after thirty years the large increments of sci- 

 ence should have found themselves easily at home and should have 

 worked no disturbance to the principles laid down in a book, of 

 which its author, in his revision of 1890, said that it had appeared 

 " in the enthusiasm of youth as an ephemeral production." The 

 truth is that the " Moods and Tenses " of 1890 is at bottom the 

 " Aloods and Tenses" of i860; for, though there was much to add 

 to a work designed to fill a larger compass, there was astonishingly 

 little to curtail, to modify in important particulars, or to reject out- 

 right. I know of no book of like complexion which possesses the 

 quality of prescience in equal degree. The " Moods and Tenses " 

 displays the working of an independent and resourceful thinker, who 

 with steadied purpose aimed at presenting the essential facts, freed 

 from the entanglements of specious and shifting theories. To its 

 judicious presentation of these facts, to its lucidity and precision 

 of statement, perhaps even to its very refusal to enter at all points 

 and at all hazards upon the treacherous ground of absolute defini- 

 tion, the book owes its fame as a standard work, still indispensal^le, 

 despite the subsequent mass of treatises, both large and small, that 

 traverse the whole or some part of the same field. And it has had 

 a wider and more salutary influence than any American or English 

 book in its province for more than half a century. 



Apart from its virtues of lucidity and orderliness, there are cer- 

 tain special features of the " Moods and Tenses " that have com- 



