Sir William Jones and his successors 515 
of the country in which he was living. He was mainly instrumental 
in establishing a society for the investigation of language and related 
subjects. He was himself the first president of the society, and in 
the “third anniversary discourse” delivered on February 2, 1786, he 
made the following observations: “The Sanscrit language, whatever 
be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the 
Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined 
than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in 
the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly 
have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer 
could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung 
from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is 
a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both 
the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different 
idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian 
might be added to the same family, if this was the place for dis- 
cussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia‘.” 
No such epoch-making discovery was probably ever announced 
with less flourish of trumpets. Though Sir William Jones lived 
for eight years more and delivered other anniversary discourses, he 
added nothing of importance to this utterance. He had neither the 
time nor the health that was needed for the prosecution of so 
arduous an undertaking. 
But the good seed did not fall upon stony ground. The news 
was speedily conveyed to Europe. By a happy chance, the sudden 
renewal of war between France and England in 1803 gave Friedrich 
Schlegel the opportunity of learning Sanscrit from Alexander 
Hamilton, an Englishman who, like many others, was confined in 
Paris during the long struggle with Napoleon. The influence of 
Schlegel was not altogether for good in the history of this re- 
search, but he was inspiring. Not upon him but upon Franz Bopp, 
a struggling German student who spent some time in Paris and 
London a dozen years later, fell the mantle of Sir William Jones. 
In Bopp’s Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic languages 
which appeared in 1833, three-quarters of a century ago, the 
foundations of Comparative Philology were laid. Since that day 
the literature of the subject has grown till it is almost, if not 
altogether, beyond the power of any single man to cope with it. 
But long as the discourse may be, it is but the elaboration of the 
text that Sir William Jones supplied. 
With the publication of Bopp’s Comparative Grammar the 
historical study of language was put upon a stable footing. Need- 
less to say much remained to be done, much still remains to be 
1 Asiatic Researches, 1. p. 422, Works of Sir W. Jones, 1. p. 26, London, 1799. 
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