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its predecessors, has no linguistic perspective, or at least none which is correct, acceptable and reasonable. It is purely comparative. You cannot altogether condemn the more or less hostile attitude of the philological tradition towards the comparativists, because the latter did not in fact bring any renewal bearing on the principles themselves, none which in practice immediately opened up any new horizons, and with which they can clearly be credited. When was it recognised that comparison is, in short, only a method to employ when we have no more direct way of ascertaining the facts, and when did comparative grammar give way to a linguistics which included comparative grammar and gave it a new direction? It was mainly the study of the Romance languages which led the IndoEuropeanists themselves to a more balanced view and afforded a glimpse of what the study of linguistics was to be in general. Doubtless the growth of Romance studies, inaugurated by Diehls, was a development of Bopp's rules for the IndoEuropean languages. In the Romance sphere, other conditions quickly became apparent; in the first place, the actual presence of the prototype of each form; thanks to Latin, which we know, Romance scholars have this prototype in front of them from the start, whereas for the Indo-European languages we have to reconstruct hypothetically the prototype of each form. Second, with the Romance languages it is perfectly possible, at least in certain periods, to follow the language from century to century through documents, and so inspect closely what was happening. These two circumstances reduce the area of conjecture and made Romance linguistics look quite different from Indo-European linguistics. It must also be said that Germanic studies to some extent played the same role as well. There the prototype does not exist, but in the case of Germanic there are long historical periods that can be followed. The historical perspective that the Indo-Europeanists lacked, because they viewed everything on the same level, was indispensable for the Romance scholars. And the historical perspective revealed how the facts were connected. Thus it came about that the influence of Romance studies was very salutary. One of the great defects, from a scholarly point of view, which is common to philology and the comparative phase is a servile attachment to the letter, to the written language, or a failure to draw a clear distinction between what might pertain to the real spoken language and what to its graphic sign. Hence, it comes about that the literary point of view is more or less confused with the linguistic point of view, and furthermore, more concretely, the written word is confused with the spoken word; two superimposed systems of signs which have nothing to do with each other, the written and the spoken, are conflated. The linguistics which gradually developed in this way is a science for which we can take the definition given by Hatzfeld, Darmstetter and Thomas's Dictionary: 'the scientific study of languages', which is satisfactory, but it is this word scientific that distinguishes it from all earlier studies. What does it take: 1) as its subject matter 2) as its object or task? 1) a scientific study will take as its subject matter every kind of variety of human language: it will not select one period or another for its literary brilliance or for the renown of the people in question. It will Pay attention to any tongue, whether obscure or famous