David Wilkins, Chamberlayne’s fellow-labourer in the compilation of the Collection of Pater Nosters referred to in a former page, may also deserve a passing notice. The place of his birth, which occurred about 1685, is a matter of some uncertainty. Adelung[136] thinks he was a native of Dantzig; by others he is believed to have been a native of Holland. The best part of his life, however, was spent in England; where, at Cambridge, he took the degree of Doctor of Divinity, in 1717. He was afterwards appointed Librarian of Lambeth and Archdeacon of Suffolk. His qualifications as Polyglot editor, at the time when he undertook to assist Chamberlayne, appear to have consisted rather in patient industry and general scholarship, than in any extraordinary familiarity with languages; though he afterwards obtained considerable reputation, especially by an edition of the New Testament in Coptic, in 1716. With the illustrious name of Leibnitz we commence a new era in the science of languages. This extraordinary man, who united in himself all the most varied, and it might seem incompatible, excellencies of other men—a jurist and a divine, a mathematician and a poet, a historian and a philosopher—added to all his other prodigious attainments a most extensive and profound knowledge of languages. It is not, however, on the actual extent of his acquaintance with particular languages (although this too was most remarkable), that his fame as a scientific linguist rests. He was the first to recognize the true nature and objects of linguistic science, and to direct its studies to an object at once eminently practical and profoundly philosophical. It is not alone that, deserting the trivialities of the old etymologists, he laid down the true principles of the great science of comparative philology, and detected its full importance; Leibnitz may claim the further merit of having himself almost created that science, and given it forth, a new Minerva, in its full and perfect development. There is hardly a principle of modern philology the germ of which may not be discovered in his singularly pregnant and suggestive essays and letters; and, what is far more remarkable, he has often, with the instinctive sagacity of original genius, anticipated sometimes by conjecture, sometimes by positive prediction, analogies and results which the investigations of actual explorers have since realized.[137]