Excerpt from The New Cratylus, or Contributions Towards a More Accurate Knowledge of the Greek Language

But although I am entitled to claim complete originality both for the conception to which this work owes its existence, and for the new combinations, which are exhibited in almost every page, I am most willing to admit the accidental influ ences which directed my attention to comparative philology at a very early period. It is more than probable that a natural tendency would have led me to engage in lexicographic te searches, like those of Ruhnken and Lobeck, and to speculate in Greek and Latin etymology, after the manner of Butmann and doderlein, even if I had never heard of Grimm or Bopp; but it so happened that, as a student of University College, London, during the first two years of its existence (1828, I had been made aware of the advantages which might be derived from a study of Sanscrit, and had acquired some knowledge of that language; and having become a contri butor to the Journal of. Education immediately after pro ceeding to my first degree in 1834, I could not but be struck by Rosen's admirable reviews of Bopp's Comparative Gram mar, and Pott's Etymological Researches, which appeared by the side of my own papers on subjects relating to classical scholarship. The time, at which I was thus once more attracted to comparative philology, was the epochal period of that study; and, for the success of my own special labours, it was for tunate, as I remarked on a former occasion, that I was enabled to abstain from all general speculations in linguistic science until I had passed through the schools of Bentley and Porson, of Buttmannn and Hermann, of Niebuhr and K. O. Muller, and had enjoyed the advantages common to all those who have encountered the competitive discipline of the University of Cambridge, advantages which the philological students of Germany are quite unable to appreciate.

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