PERIZONIUS, JACOB (1651-1715), classical scholar the most distinguished member of a learned Dutch family of that name (Voorbroek in the vernacular), was the eldest son of Anton Perizonius, author of a once well-known treatise, De ratione studii theologici, and was born at Dam in Groningen on 26th October 1651. He received his school education at Dam and Deventer, and afterwards studied in the university of Utrecht, where he came under the influence of Graivius and abandoned theology for pure literature. The death of his father and other untoward circumstances involved him in a struggle with various outward difficulties, but the influence of Heinsius and Grwvius, who already appreciated him highly, and expected great things from him, ultimately procured for him in 1682 the appointment to the chair of eloquence and history at Frolicker, where his expositions of Cicero,Terencc, Florus, and Suetonins, as well as his lectures on general history, attracted a large and increasing number of hearers. In 1693,he was promoted to the corresponding chair at Leyden, where he succeeded F. Spanheim in 1701. His death took place in that city on Gth April 1715.

The works of Perizonius both as an author and as an editor were very numerous, and by universal consent entitle him to a place of the highest rank among the scholars of his age. Special interest attaches to his edition of the Minerva of Sanctius or Sanchez (1st -ed. 16S7, 4th od. 1714), which may be said to be one of the last developments of the study of Latin grammar while in its prescientific stage, when the phenomena of language had not yet ceased to be regarded as for the most part disconnected, conventional, or fortuitous. Mention must also be made of his Animadversiones historicx, in Tabus quant plurima in priscis Renianarum rerun. sed utriusque lintyux auetoribus notantur, multa etiam illustrantuc (ague entendfMtitr, varia denique antiquorum rituum, eruuntur it nberius caplicantur (16S5), a work which Bayle has characterized as deserving to be entitled "The Errata of scholars and critics," and of his Dissertationes due® de Republica Romanic, alluded to with honour by Niebuhr in the preface to his Roman History (4th ed., 1S33) as marking the beginning of that new era of classical study with which his own name is so closely associated.