The subject of comparative philology has always interested scholars, but latterly the study has been carried on in a more scientific manner, and I may also say with more success, than at any former period. One great object in prosecuting the study is to detect the various disguises which words radically the same are apt to assume in different languages or dialects. The great scholars of two centuries ago were fully alive to the importance of this inquiry, and although they sometimes indulged in too great a latitude of conjecture, there is scarcely an etymological affinity now generally admitted of which traces and indications are not plainly to be found in the works of those learned men, and more particularly in the writings of Salmasius, the greatest of them all.