GRONOVIUS, or GRONOV, Jakob (1645-1716), one of the very great scholars of the 17th century, was born 20th October 1645 at Deventer, where his father, J. F. Gronovius {q.v.}, was at that time professor of rhetoric and history. On the completion of his studies at Leyden, where he had early distinguished himself by his powers of intellectual acquisition, he in 1698 visited England, where he became acquainted with Pocock, Pearson, and Mery Casaubon, and where he devoted several months to the collation of rare manuscripts at Oxford and Cambridge. His edition of Polybius, published at Leyden in 1670, in addition to his own and variorum notes, contained those which Casaubon on his deathbed had bequeathed to him. Declining an invitation to a chair at Deventer, he in 1671 visited France, and was brought into intimate relations with D’Herbelot, Thevenot, and other distinguished scholars; and after another brief interval at Leyden he in 1672 travelled in Spain, whence he passed into Italy. There he accepted from the grand duke of Tuscany a chair at the university of Pisa, which, however, he resigned at the end of two years. Having returned to Deventer by way of Germany, he had settled down with the purpose of working uninterruptedly at an edition of Livy, when in 1679 he was invited by the curators of the university of Leyden to occupy a professorial chair. Here, untempted by several pressing invitations to various foreign universities, he spent the remaining years of his life, in which the calmness which normally characterizes even the most ardent scholarly research was unfortunately too often broken by literary quarrels conducted on his part with excessive violence and scurrility. He died 21st October 1716....