A Frenchman named de Chésy learned Sanskrit from a British officer named Hamilton, who, on his way from India, was detained in France, and taught it, as he says, to Franz Bopp, a German philologist, who made use of it in a work on the system of conjugation, and thus became, unintentionally, a Columbus-like discoverer of the great science of Comparative Philology. For Bopp “builded better than he knew.” His purpose was merely to work out his system of conjugation; but in doing this he revealed and established the unity of speech in all the Aryan or Indo-European peoples. This he himself afterward elaborated in his “Comparative Grammar” of the chief Aryan languages. Then came another great German philologist, Jacob Grimm, who discovered the law, or method, according to which words changed their forms; and the great end was accomplished. This happened in 1816-19; and since that time Comparative Philology has worked upon the lines indicated by Bopp and Grimm. Bopp’s great “Comparative Grammar,” however, did not appear until 1833. One of the most important, if not the most important of the results of the discovery of Sanskrit, and the consequent prosecution of the study of language upon the historical and comparative method—the only safe method for the study of any subject—is the revelation of the origin, and to a certain and very remarkable degree, of the early unrecorded history of the Aryan or Indo-European peoples; that race which has received the latter name because it occupies, and for two thousand years and more has occupied, all India and Europe. Let us glance at this history as it is thus revealed, for it is very much to our present purpose.