 Grimm himself did not initially intend to include all the languages in his "Grammar", but he soon found that Old High German postulated Gothic, and that the later stages of German could not be understood without the help of other West Germanic varieties including English, and that the literature of Scandinavia could not be ignored.The first edition of the first part of the "Grammar", which appeared in 1819, treated the inflections of all these languages, and included a general introduction in which he vindicated the importance of an historical study of the German language against the quasi-philosophical methods then in vogue.In 1822 the book appeared in a second edition (really a new work, for, as Grimm himself says in the preface, he had to "mow the first crop down to the ground").