In an article appearing in the March 1897 number of the Atlantic Monthly, Harvard professor Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) lamented the dominant influence of German-style scientific philology on classics professors in American institutions of higher learning. “The present generation of classical philologists,” Babbitt wrote, “reminds one of a certain sect of Japanese Buddhists which believes that salvation is to be attained by arriving at a knowledge of the infinitely small. Positions, it is said, have recently been given in American colleges to men who have shown their assimilation of the classical spirit by writing theses on the ancient horse-bridle and on the Roman door-knob.”
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