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Excerpt from A Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language: In Which Its Forms Are Illustrated by Those of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Saxon, Old Friesic, Old Norse, and Old High-German The Anglo-Saxon language has been studied at Lafayette College for many years in the light of modern philology. It seemed necessary to print, for the use of its students, general laws of phonology and syntax, with tables of analogous paradigms, prefixes, suffixes, and idioms. In preparing this outline for the press, love of the work has led me to fill it up into a Comparative Grammar. Other Comparative Grammars have discussed several languages, each for the illustration of all, and of language in general; this book is an Anglo-Saxon Grammar, and uses forms of other tongues and general laws of language only so far as they illustrate the Anglo-Saxon. The hope has, however, been cherished that the methods of Comparative Grammar might be exemplified more fully than they have yet been for our students, in connection with the early forms of our mother tongue, and that in this way the Anglo-Saxon might be associated with the modern Science of Language, and share its honors. If this hope should be answered, the book may serve as an introduction to the masters in whose light it has grown up - to Jacob Grimm, the greatest genius among the grammarians, whose imagination and heart are as quick as his reason and industry, and make his histories of speech as inspiring as poetry - to Francis Bopp, impersonation of pure science, who never spreads his wings, but who pursues his thread of thought with unfailing sagacity till he loses it in the islands of the Pacific - to George Curtius, master of the new and the old, surest and safest of guides - to Pott - to Kunh and his collaborators. Special students of Anglo-Saxon must spend their days and nights with Grein, whose Glossary of Anglo-Saxon Poetry first made possible a thorough treatment of its grammar, and to who