Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/19

Rh the philologists of that day accepted the Adelung-Grimm. hypothesis, and it remained unattacked until long past the middle of the present century. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Pott, Miklosich, Steinthal, Madvig, and Georg Curtius, for example, accepted it openly. It is unnecessary for me to describe at length how this theory stands in the closest relation to a belief still prevailing in the days of Humboldt and Grimm,—the belief in a golden age of mankind, where poetry beautified and simplified the whole life of primitive man. Nor need I dwell on its particularly close relation to the then current theory of the origin and nature of folk-poetry. The explanation of Adelung and Grimm has long out-lived those views and beliefs out of which it originated. Yet even Wilhelm Scherer called the chapter on gender the acme of Grimm's grammar. And only a few years ago, in 1890, this theory found a warm and eloquent defender in the person of Gustav Roethe, a young Germanic scholar of talent and repute. In the preface to the new edition of the third volume of Grimm's grammar, edited by him, this scholar declares Grimm's view of the origin of gender to be correct in all essential points. But opposition had arisen before Roethe's time. A