This small volume is made up of two lectures Moulton gave to students at Cambridge on August 19th and 20th in 1902. At the time of his lectures, there was no introductory volume in linguistics available in English, and so Moulton presented these essays to Cambridge University Press for publication to help fill that gap. The goal of the lectures was to rouse the audience's interest in the study of language and encourage further reading in the field.
While much has changed and developed in linguistics since Moulton's day, the study of historical linguistics, of which Moulton's comparative philology was a part, continues to use the same basic methodologies as Moulton himself used. This fact, combined with the reality that linguistic study still struggles to make inroads into biblical scholarship, makes Moulton's small volume particularly valuable.
