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Let us know the exact words an author uses. Let us get at the exact value of each word by that severe induction of which Buttmann and the great Germans have set such noble examples; and then, and not till then, we may begin to talk about philosophy, and aesthetics, and the rest. Very Probably Aristarchus was right in his dislike of Crates's preference of what he called criticism, to grammar.
The vacillation in the eighteenth century between various theories of the explanation of the nature of ancient polytheism—theories which were all false, though not equally false—is in this respect significant enough; likewise the gradual progress which characterises research in the nineteenth century, and which may be indicated by such names as Heyne, Buttmann, K. O. Müller, Lobeck, Mannhardt, Rohde, and Usener, to mention only some of the most important and omitting those still alive.
Indeed, not the least of its merits is this, that, in addition to the excellent matter which is original with Professor Goodwin, it furnishes to the student, American or English, for we hope to see its merits recognized on the other side of the Atlantic, a digest, as it were, of all that is most valuable on the subject of the syntax of the Greek verb in the best German grammars, from Buttmann to Madvig, enhanced, too, in value by being recast and worked into a homogeneous system by an acute scholar and experienced teacher.
The definitions of Creuzer, Hermann, Buttmann, Heyne, Welcker, Voss, and Müller are none of them Better, and some of them not as good. Hist. of Greece, vol. i. ch. xvi. p. 579. The idea of the existence of an enlightened people, who lived at a remote era, and came from the East, was a very prevalent notion among the ancient traditions.
It was left for more patient and less noisy men, like Grimm, Bopp, and Buttmann, to found a science of philology, to discover for us those great laws which connect modern philology with history, ethnology, physiology, and with the very deepest questions of theology itself.
The transition to the new school of grammarians was made in 1792, by the publication of a Greek Grammar by Philip Buttmann, which, in the greatly improved form which it afterwards received from his hands, is familiar to all Greek scholars.
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