As long as the selection and the commentary are in order it may serve its purpose very well, and l believe that there are still many teachers who find Wyatt's Reader useful. And yet the scholarly style of the 19th century was still fashionable in historical linguistics in the 1960,s and 70's. But they were never designed to be read in the way one reads ordinary books. They were meant to be reference books, and as such are still extremely useful. But in an age in which excellent textbooks appeared in many other linguistic fields, the limited use which was made of readable textbooks in historical linguistics in some universities, Copenhagen among them, became a factor against the discipline itself.
Today there is no shortage of textbooks in historical linguistics.
The narrow scope In Copenhagen as well as in several other universities, the teaching of historical linguistics was centered round historical phonology. In fact, the dominance of phonology was such that many students left the university with a conviction that S equaled L . This is hardly surprising in view of the heavy reliance on the scholarly tradition referred to above, Sievers, Brunner, Luick, etc. , but it meant that the discipline was not as strong as it could have been when it came under attack. Even a short modern coursebook, e.g. any one of the three mentioned above, contains much more external history , and much more about non- phonological aspects of language, than the old tradition, and this is a great advantage for the contemporary teaching of historical linguistics. The discipline no longer presents itself as being almost sui generis , but is openly related to other disciplines like sociolinguistics and syntax.