The brothers Grimm are known to what is called the reading public chiefly as contributors to the literature of the nursery; and as for Bopp, Pott, Zeuss, Lassen, Diefenbach, and the rest, men who look upon the curse of Babel as the luckiest event in human annals, their names and works are terrors to the uninitiated.  They are the giants of these latter days, of whom all we know is that they now and then snatch up some unhappy friend of ours and imprison him in their terrible castle of Nongtongpaw, whence, if he ever escape, he comes back to us emaciated, unintelligible, and with a passion for roots that would make him an ornament of society among the Digger Indians.

Yet though in metaphor giants of learning, their office seems practically rather that of the dwarfs, as gatherers and guardians of treasure useless to themselves, but with which some luck’s-child may enrich himself and his neighbors.  Other analogies between them and the dwarfs, such as their accomplishing superhuman things and being prematurely subject to the dryness of old ago, ("Der Zwerg ist schon im siebenten Jahr ein Greis,” says Grimm,) will at once suggest themselves.

Mr. Mueller is one of the agreeable luck’s-children who lay these swarthy miners under contribution for us, understand their mystic sign-language, and save us the trouble of climbing the mountain and scratching through the thickets for ourselves.  Happy the man who can make knowledge entertaining!  Thrice happy his readers!  The author of these Lectures is already well known as not only, perhaps, the best living scholar of Sanscrit literature, (and by scholar we mean one who regards study as a means, not an end, and who is capable of drawing original conclusions,) but a savant who can teach without tiring, and can administer learning as if it were something else than medicine.  Whoever reads this volume will regret that Mr. Mueller’s eminent qualifications for the Boden Professorship at Oxford should have failed to turn the scale against the assumed superior orthodoxy of his competitor.  Was it in Sanscrit that he was heterodox? or in Hindoo mythology?

The Lectures are nine in number.  The titles of them will show the range and nature of Mr. Mueller’s dissertations.  They are, (1.) On the science of language as one of the physical sciences; (2.) On the growth of language in contradistinction to the history of language; (3.) On the empirical stage in the science of language; (4.) On the classificatory stage in the same; (5.) On the genealogical classification of languages; (6.) On comparative grammar; (7.) On the constituent elements of language; (8.) On the morphological classification of languages; (9.) On the theoretical stage in the science of languages and the origin of language.  An Appendix contains a genealogical table of languages; and an ample Index (why have authors forgotten, what was once so well known, that an index is all that saves the contents of a book from being mere birds in the bush?) makes the volume as useful on the shelf as it is interesting and instructive in the hand.  Of the catholic spirit in which Mr. Mueller treats his various topics of discussion and illustration, his own theory of the true method of investigation is the best proof.