GOODWIN, WILLIAM WATSON (1831 )

This article appears in Volume V12, Page 241 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: GOA-GRA

GOODWIN, WILLIAM WATSON (1831 ) , American classical scholar, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 9th of May 1831. He graduated at Harvard in 1851, studied in Germany, was tutor in Greek at Harvard in 1856186o, and Eliot professor of Greek there from 186o until his resignation in 1901. He became an overseer of Harvard in 1903. In 18821883 he was the first director of the American School for Classical Studies at Athens. Goodwin edited the Panegyricus of Isocrates (1864) and Demosthenes On The Crown (1901); and assisted in preparing the seventh edition of Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon. He revised an English version by several writers of Plutarch's Morals (5 vols., 1871; 6th ed., 1889), and published the Greek text with literal English version of Aeschylus' Agamemnon (1906) for the Harvard production of that play in June 1906. As a teacher he did much to raise the tone of classical reading from that of a mechanical exercise to literary study. But his most important

work

WORK

was his Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (1860), of which the seventh revised edition appeared in 1877 and another (enlarged) in 1890. This was " based in part on Madvig and Kruger," but, besides making accessible to American students the works of these continental grammarians, it presented

original

ORIGINAL

matter, including a " radical innovation in the classification of conditional sentences," notably the " distinction between particular and general suppositions." Goodwin's Greek Grammar (elementary edition, 187o;.enlarged 1879; revised and enlarged 1892) gradually superseded in most American schools the Grammar of Hadley and Allen. Both the ,Moods and Tenses and the Grammar in later editions are largely dependent on the theories of Gildersleeve for additions and changes. Goodwin also wrote a few elaborate syntactical studies, to be found in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, the twelfth volume of which was dedicated to him upon the completion of fifty years as an alumnus of Harvard and

forty

FORTY

-one years as 'Eliot professor.
was unable to establish factories there. In France a company for the manufacture of vulcanized rubber by his process failed, and in December 1855 he was arrested and imprisoned for debt in Paris. Owing to the expense of the litigation in which he was engaged and to bad business management, he profited little from his inventions. He died in New

York

City on the 1st of July 186o. He wrote an account of his discovery entitled Gum-Elastic and its Varieties (2 vols., New Haven, 1853-z855).
See also B. K. Peirce, Trials of an Inventor, Life and Discoveries of Charles Goodyear (New

York

, 1866); James Parton, Famous Americans of

Recent

RECENT

Times (Boston, 1867); and

Herbert

Terry

TERRY, EDWARD
TERRY, ELLEN ALICIA (1848– )

, India Rubber and its Manufacture (New York, 1907).

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