in a hand-lexicon of any modern tongue, this wide range of linguistic research is misplaced, because it necessarily excludes much that is of more immediate importance to the understanding and the use of the vocabulary. Richardson's, which, however, is faulty in arrangement, and too bulky for convenient use as a manual, best answers the true idea of an English dictionary, because it follows, more closely than any other, the history of the words it defines. For the purposes of general use, no foreign roots should be introduced into the etymological part of a dictionary, barely because they resemble, and are presumably cognate with, words of our own language. The selection of such should be limited to those from which the English word is known to be derived, and such others as, by their form or their meaning, serve more clearly to explain either its orthography or some of its significations. Whatever is beyond this belongs to the domain of linguistics, comparative grammar, ethnology, to a thesaurus not a dictionary, and it can find room in this latter only by excluding what, for the purposes of a dictionary, is of greater value.

I have already assigned what seemed to me sufficient reasons for making the present course philological, not linguistic, and I cannot, without occupying time more appropriately employed otherwise, enter into a discussion of the aims and importance of linguistic studies in their bearing upon etymology, the great question of the unity of the species, and the general laws of intellectual action, the highest problems which unaided humanity can aspire to solve. I freely allow their profound interest and their strict scientific character, but they must, for the present, be the special property of the few, not, like the mother-tongue, the common heritage of the many; and I now again refer to them only to protest against the inference that I deny or depreci

ate their worth, because I think it necessary, in a preparatory course, to exclude them from consideration.

The extravagance of etymologists has brought the whole study of words into popular discredit; and though that study is now pursued in much stricter accordance with philosophic method, instances of wild conjecture and absurd speculation are still by no means wanting. Ménage, formerly often, and now sometimes, cited as an authority in French etymology, and of course with respect to the origin of English words borrowed from the French, is among the boldest of these inquirers. He hesitates not to assign any foreign primitive, no matter how distant the source, as the origin of the French word resembling it; and when none such offers, he coins a LowLatin root for the occasion. In such cases, the detection of the falsehood is difficult, its refutation next to impossible, for in the chaos of monkish and secular writers in that corrupted dialect, who can say what barbarisms may not occur? Menage is not the only etymologist who has sinned in this way, for it is one of the safest and easiest of literary frauds. Dr. Johnson thought we were not authorized to deny that there might be witches, because nothing proved their non-existence; and the same principle may compel us to pause in disputing a plausible etymology, for want of evidence to show that the supposed root does or does not actually exist in a given vocabulary. The wise old Fuller, whom no lover of wit, truth, beauty, and goodness can ever tire of reading, says, in reference to an extravagant etymology:

"As for those that count the Tatars the offspring of the ten tribes of Israel, which Salmanasar led away captive, because Tatari or Totari signifieth in the Hebrew and Syriack tongue a residue or remnant, learned men have sufficiently confuted it. And surely it seemeth a forced and overstrained

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deduction to farre-fetch the name of Tartars from. a Hebrew word, a language so far distant from them. But no more hereof; because, perchance, herein the woman's reason hath a masculine truth; and the Tartarians are called so, because they are [called] so. It may be curious etymologists (let them lose their wages who work in difficult trifles) seek to reap what was never sown, whilst they study to make those words speak reason, which are only voces ad placitum, imposed at pleasure."

The theory of Fuller was better than his practice, and he not unfrequently indulged in etymological speculations as absurd as that which he ridicules respecting the Tatars, for he derives compliment, not, as he says others did, "à completione mentis," but "à completè mentiri," because compliments are usually completely mendacious; and elsewhere he quotes with seeming assent Sir John Harrington's opinion that the old English elf and goblin came from the names of the two great political factions of the Empire, the Guelphs and Ghibellines. One can hardly believe Roger Ascham serious in deriving war from warre or werre, the old form of the comparative worse, because war is worse than peace; but even this derivation is only less absurd than

* Allied to this is Spenser's derivation of world :

But when the word woxe old, it woxe warre old,
(Whereof it hight,)

Faerie Queen, B. iv., C. viii., S. xxxi. The ingenious author of the excellent little work on English Synonyms, edited by Archbishop Whately, supposes world to be the participle whirled, and says the word was evidently expressive of roundness. The wh in whirl, (hv in the corresponding Gothic words,) is radical, and would not have been represented in Anglo-Saxon by w, as in world, weoruld, world. Besides this, the word world is older than the knowledge of the globular form or the rotation of the earth among the Gothic tribes. A still more conclusive argument against this etymology is the fact, that the Anglo-Saxon world, the Icelandic verölld,

Blackstone's of parson from persona, persona ecclesiæ, because the parson personates or represents the church. The most extraordinary word-fanciers we have had in English literature are Murray and Ker. Murray derives all English, in fact all articulate words, from nine primary monosyllables, which are essentially natural to primitive man. The family likeness between the nine is so strong that Murray might, with much convenience and small loss of probability, have reduced them to one, for they all agree in their vowel and final consonant. The catalogue of these surprisingly prolific roots is this: 1, ag, wag, or hwag; 2, bag, or bwag; 3, dwag; 4, cwag; 5, lag; 6, mag; 7, nag; 8, rag; and 9, swag. Ker is somewhat less ambitious, but quite as original and ingenious in his theories. He found the English public simple enough to buy two editions of a work in two volumes, the object of which is to show that a very large proportion of our current English proverbs are, not translations or imitations of Dutch ones, but mere mispronunciations, corruptions of common Dutch phrases and expressions totally different in meaning from that which is ascribed to the proverbs, as we employ them. Thus the proverbial phrase, 'He took the bull by the horns,' is a corruption of 'hii tuck tije bol by die hoorens,' which means, here head calls contrivance in; that it is as it ought to be. As still as a mouse,' is, 'als stille als er meê hose,' as still as one without shoes, and even the national cry, 'Old England forever!' is not plain English at all, but Low-Dutch for Hail to your country-evince your zeal for her!'

did not mean the earth, the physical, but the moral, the human world, the Latin seculum. The Anglo-Saxon name of the earth was middan-eard, or middan-geard, corresponding to the Moso-Gothic midjung ards. The most probable etymology of world seems to be wer, (cognate with the Latin vir,) man, and old, age or time.

The general idea is of course too absurd to be met by argument, and the book is of about the same philological value as Swift's Medical Consultation, and other trifles, where the words are Latin in form, but similar in sound to English words of different signification, so that the Latin words is, his, honor, sic, mean, Is his Honor sick? The speculations of more recent and more eminent philologists, though certainly made more plausible by historical evidence and by apparent analogies, are, sometimes, not less unreasonable.*

Crambe, a character in the Memoirs of Scriblerus much given to punning, declares that he was always under the dominion of some particular word, which formed the theme of his puns. Muys, a very late and learned German philologist, who occupies himself with Greek etymology, is, unconsciously no doubt, under the influence of a similar verbal

I certainly do not intend to class Dr. Latham with the dreamers to whom I refer in the text, but I must be permitted here to notice what is, at least, an inaccuracy of expression in his etymology of our English word drake. He says, (English Language 2d Edition, p. 214,) "It [drake] is derived from a word with which it has but one letter in common; viz., the Latin anas, duck." The common name of the duck in the Gothic languages is doubtless allied to anas, and in most of them the same root occurs in forms which contain the consonantal elements of the word drake. Two of these elements, the r and k, are signs of the masculine termination. The d is radical, as are also the corresponding mute t in the Latin anas, (genitive anat-is,) and the n which has been dropped from drake, or rather perhaps formed the d by coalescence with the t, as in modern Greek, where r is pronounced d, and therefore drake and anas are related as being both derived from a common root. But to assert that drake is derived from anas is not only a violation of the legitimate rules of etymological deduction, but it involves the historical improbability of affirming that a people as old as the Romans themselves were without a name for one of the commonest and most important game-birds of their climate, until they borrowed one from their foreign invaders. In fact, if either nation received the word from the other, instead of both inheriting it from some common but remote source, the habits of the bird in question, whose birthplace and proper home is in the far North, would render it more probable that the Gothic was the original, the Latin the derivative form.