One of the essentials of scholarship is innovation. The scholar either presents new facts or reinterprets older facts so that the problem may be viewed in a new way. Thus, as each generation of researchers reviews the canon of established tradition and deviates from it in some new way, a pattern is achieved which is often cyclical: what is accepted by one generation provides the basis for the deviation of a second, and the deviation of a succeeding generation often moves somewhat "backwards" to the original view, which is put forth with certain, often essential, modifications, and so on. Such a cyclical pattern is characteristic of the classification of the Russian verb into conjugations and aspects. For example, 18th century Russian grammarians, e.g., M. V. Lomonosov (1755) and his imitators at home and abroad, classified Russian verbs into only two conjugations, based on the ending of the second person singular (-ешь or -ишь) with subdivisions according to the stem final consonant of the first person singular.1 The Czech Josef Dobrovsky (1799), disregarding F. M. Peld's (1795) very sophisticated grammar of Czech, in which verbs were classified according to the ending of the first person singular, returned to the tradition of the Latin grammarians and classified verbs according to the infinitive, while his younger colleague and admirer, Jernej Kopitar (1808, 323) classified Slovenien verbs, as Pelcl had, according to the ending of the first person singular. In the same year, Vater (1808) published a complex classification according to the infinitive which so impressed the orientalist Boldyrev that in 1812 he became the first Russian to call publicly for a revision of Lomonosov's classification. Then Dobrovsky (1809 and 1819) revised his earlier work and classified Czech verbs according to the infinitive and the present tense. In the middle of the 19th century, Schleicher (1852, 287) returned to a classification according to the theme of the present tense, while Miklosich (1856) classified verbs according to the infinitive, with further subdivisions according to the present tense forms. Finally, Leskien (1898) classified verbs according to the theme of the present tense, but there was no longer much resemblance to Lomonosov's division according to -ешь and -ишь. For the most part, the classifications according to the form of the present tense or according to the infinitive exhausted the classificatory possibilities. Of course, there were early attempts to combine each of these, such as that