Karl Brugmann (1849-1919) was one of the central figures in the circle of Neogrammarians who rejected a prescriptive approach to the study of language in favour of diachronic study. This short overview of the development of comparative Indo-European linguistics and philology in the second part of the nineteenth century was first published in 1885, the year before Brugmann's celebrated multi-volume comparative grammar of Indo-European began to appear...