rative grammar were treated by my teachers, men
such as Gottfried Hermann, Haupt, Westermann, Stallbaum, and others.
No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor
Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit,
Zend, Greek, Latin, and Gothic. All hands were against him; and if in
comparing Greek and Latin with Sanskrit, Gothic, Celtic, Slavonic, or
Persian, he happened to have placed one single accent wrong, the
shouts of those who knew nothing but Greek and Latin, and probably
looked in their Greek dictionaries to be quite sure of their accents,
would never end. Dugald Stewart, rather than admit a relationship
between Hindus and Scots, would rather believe that the whole Sanskrit
language and the whole of Sanskrit literature--mind, a literature
extending over three thousand years and larger than the ancient
literature of either Greece or Rome--was a forgery of those wily
priests, the Brahmans. I remember too how, when I was at school at
Leipzig (and a very good school it was, with such masters as Nobbe,
Forbiger, Funkhaenel, and Palm--an old school too, which could boast
of Leibnitz among its former pupils) I remember, I say, one of our
masters (Dr. Klee) telling us one afternoon, when it was too hot to do
any serious work, that there was a language spoken in India, which was
much the same as Greek and Latin, nay, as German and Russian. At first
we thought it was a joke, but when one saw the parallel columns of
numerals, pronouns, and verbs in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin written on
the blackboard, one felt in the presence of facts, before which one
had to bow. All one's ideas of Adam and Eve, and the Paradise, and the
tower of Babel, and Shem, Ham, and Japhet, with Homer and AEneas and
Virgil too, seemed to be whirling round and round, till at last one
picked up the fragments and tried to build up a new world, and to live
with a new historical consciousness.

Here you will see why I consider a certain knowledge of India an
essential portion of a liberal or an historical education. The concept
of the European man has been changed and widely extended by our
acquaintance with India, and we know now that we are something
different from what we thought we were. Suppose the Americans, owing
to some cataclysmal events, had forgotten their English origin, and
after two or three thousand years found themselves in possession of a
language and of ideas which they could trace back historicall