PREFACE. THIS book contains the substance of lectures delivered at Oxford in 1874 and 1875 to candidates for Honours in Classics at the First Public Examination, upon the prescribed subject of the Elements of Comparative Philology as applied to the illustration of Greek and Latin Inflections,' and therefore does not profess to deal with more than a very limited portion of the wide field covered by the Science of Language. In the course of my lectures I was often met by the difficulty of recommending to pupils any English text-book that would give them in a compact and accessible form the means of preparing the subject for themselves; and I had hoped that the want thus felt might have been supplied for our students by the Oxford Professor of Comparative Philology. So long as there was any prospect of help from that quarter, it would have been presumptuous in me to come forward. But Professor Max Müller has been unable to spare time from more important labours; and the preparation of this Manual has perforce been entrusted to inferior hands. As to the educational value of the limited area of philological study which is here surveyed, I am aware that opinions differ. It is said, for example, that a study of the forms of Greek and Latin words is a mere effort of memory, testing neither the reflective powers nor the application of deductive method, and therefore not worth introducing as a separate subject into the curriculum of study for Classical Examinations at Oxford. It might, I think, be asserted with equal truth |