made himself thoroughly master of the subject; and that, especially in its bearings upon the general science of philology, or the great question of the unity of languages and its kindred ethnological problems, he had not only exhausted all the learning of his predecessors, but had successfully applied to it all the powers of his own comprehensive and original genius. To the consideration, too, of this numerous family of languages he brought a mind stored with the knowledge of all the other great families both of the East and of the West; and although it is not easy to say what his success in speaking languages may have been, it is impossible to doubt either the variety or the solidity of his attainments both as a scientific and as a practical linguist. But Humboldt’s place with posterity must be that of a philologer rather than of a linguist. His Essay on the “Diversity of the Formation of Human Language, and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind,” published posthumously in 1836, as an Introduction to his Analysis of the Kawi Language, is a work of extraordinary learning and research, as well as of profound and original thought; analysing all the successive varieties of grammatical structure which characterize the several classes of language in their various stages of structural development, from the naked simplicity of Chinese up to the minute and elaborate inflexional variety of the Sanscritic family. M. Bunsen describes this wonderful work as “the _Calculus Sublimis_ of linguistic theory,” and declares that “it places William von Humboldt’s name by the side of that of Leibnitz in universal comparative ethnological philology.”[153]