vi OBITUARY NOTICES OF MEMBERS DECEASED. 



manded most attention : the distinction between the time of an action 

 and the character of an action, the distinction between absolute and 

 relative time, the division of conditional sentences (and in particu- 

 lar the treatment of shall and unll and should and zvould conditions, 

 which Goodwin discussed at some length in the Transactions of the 

 American Philological Association, Vol. 7 (1876), and in the Journal 

 of Philology, Vol. 8 (1879)), the relation of the optative to the sub- 

 junctive and other moods, and the origin of the construction of ov /xt^ 

 with the subjunctive and the future indicative. 



The author of the " ]\Ioods and Tenses," the doctor irrefragabilis 

 of Greek syntax, would have been the last to claim that he had, with 

 Browning's grammarian, settled all of the " on's business." He had 

 not been, like Tom Steady in " The Idler," " a vehement assertor of 

 uncontroverted truths; and by keeping himself out of the reach of 

 contradiction, had acquired all the confidence which the conscious- 

 ness of irresistible abilities could have given." There is much in 

 Greek syntax that is debatable territory ; but whenever Goodwin 

 entered that territory — though he was not a statistician, as the earlier 

 great scholars were not — his prevailing soundness of judgment and 

 his range of illustration afford the controversialist only rarely the 

 luxury of holding a different opinion. 



Goodwin's " Greek Grammar" appeared ten years after the " Moods 

 and Tenses," and inherited as by right the distinction and the dis- 

 tinctive features of the earlier work. The " Moods and Tenses " 

 appealed to the advanced student and the teacher ; the " Grammar " 

 brought before the neophyte the facts of the language in exact and 

 clear form ; and showed that its author possessed the rare (and often 

 underestimated) faculty of making a good elementary book. Only 

 he who has himself labored to improve on Goodwin can adequately 

 realize the clarity and compactness of his statements that never err 

 through undue emphasis either on logical or on aesthetic relations. 



The very excellence and success of Goodwin's work in the depart- 

 ment of grammar made the wider public, and to a certain degree 

 even the Hellenists of this country, ignorant of the scope and the 

 distinction of his work in other fields. It is an altogether erro- 

 neous notion that Goodwin was purely a grammarian, honorable as 



