Verbal Scholarship and the Growth of Some Abstract Terms. By
A. C. Pearson. (Cambridge. 2s. 6d. net.)—The new Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge devoted his inaugural lecture to a defence of pure scholarship with special reference to the abstract terms that took on a more definite meaning as Greek philosophy developed and changed. As the archaeologists have long held up the grammarians to contempt, this temperate and reasoned reply is opportune. Professor Pearson reminds us that certain English words, like "respectable" and "disgust- ing," have lost the connotation that they had in Jane Austen's day. If English words can change their meaning in a century, it may be inferred that the terms used in the keenly intellectual atmosphere of Greece between the time of Homer and that of Aristotle were not fossilized, especially as the language was rapidly progressing. The author gives some illustrative examples, of high importance for the history of Greek thought. He might, of course, have retorted on the archaeologists by reminding them that the great Galatian controversy, waged so stoutly by Professor Ramsay and others, turned largely on the significance of the definite article in later Greek, which the grammarians were best qualified to explain.
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