have tackled over the years and which keep me busy now, somehow hang together, however much each one of them may have depended on inevitable accident.” To begin with, there is the philology; various papers dealing with topics in Etruscan, Greek, and Latin, as well as a smaller number of articles treating issues in Indo-Iranian and Sanskrit. To a very large extent, however, what motivates these studies is an underlying quest for generalization: methods and principles governing how languages change over time and how one goes about reconstructing an ancestral protolanguage. The need to find these principles and to make explicit the methods followed in historical and comparative linguistics occupied him throughout his career. Henry mentioned (1980, p. 24) his early preoccupation with such issues, including his wish that comparative evidence be presented “upward in time as inference, and not downward as history.”² The close attention to principles and methods also led Henry to be involved closely with the history of the field to which he contributed. He was particularly careful to distinguish between the concrete work that such giants of nineteenth-century Indo-European linguistics as Karl Brugmann and Jacob Wackernagel carried out and the theoretical “preachments,” as he occasionally called them,³ of August Leskien, Brugmann, and others. This attention to methods and the history of his field complemented Henry’s interest, in his later years, in the related area of cladistics (Hoenigswald and Wiener, 1987).

In view of Henry’s constant preoccupation throughout his professional life with methodology and procedures for reconstruction—he went so far as to speak on occasion of algorighms⁴—Language Change and Linguistic Reconstruction may justifiably be considered his major work. This monograph is certainly the principal recapitulation of thinking that went back to his very early years, results of which Henry