alone are sufficient; and he proceeded to carry this into effect by making a dictionary without definitions or explanations of meaning, or at least with the merest rudiments of them, but illustrating each group of words by a large series of quotations. In the collection of these he displayed immense research. Going far beyond the limits of Dr. Johnson, he quoted from authors back to the year 1300, and probably for the first time made Chaucer and Gower and Piers Ploughman living names to many readers. And his special notion was quite correct in theory. Quotations will tell the full meaning of a word, if one has enough of them; but it takes a great many to be enough, and it takes a reader a long time to read and weigh all the quotations, and to deduce from them the meanings which might be put before him in a line or two.

As a fact, while Richardson's notion was correct in theory, mundane conditions of space and time rendered it humanly impracticable. Nevertheless, the mass of quotations, most of them with exact references, collected by him, and printed under the word-groups which they illustrated, was a service never to be undervalued or forgotten, and his work, ‘A New Dictionary of the English Language ... Illustrated by Quotations from the best Authors’ by Charles Richardson, LL.D., 1836–7, still continues to be a valuable repertory of illustrations.

Such was the position of English lexicography in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the late Dr. Trench, then Dean of Westminster, who had already written several esteemed works on the English language and the history of words, read two papers before the Philological Society in London ‘On some Deficiencies in existing English Dictionaries,’ in which, while speaking with much appreciation of the labours of Dr. Johnson and his successors, he declared that these labours yet fell far short of giving us the ideal English Dictionary. Especially, he pointed out that for the history of words and families of words, and for the changes of form and sense which words had historically passed through, they gave hardly any help whatever. No one could find out from all the dictionaries extant how long any particular word had been in the language, which of the many senses in which many words were used was the original, or how or when these many senses had been developed; nor, in the case of words

described as obsolete, were we told when they became obsolete or by whom they were last used. He pointed out also that the obsolete and the rarer words of the language had never been completely collected; that thousands of words current in the literature of the past three centuries had escaped the diligence of Johnson and all his supplementers; that, indeed, the collection of the requisite material for a complete dictionary could not be compassed by any one man, however long-lived and however diligent, but must be the work of many collaborators who would undertake systematically to read and to extract English literature. He called upon the Philological Society, therefore, as the only body in England then interesting itself in the language, to undertake the collection of materials to complete the work already done by Bailey, Johnson, Todd, Webster, Richardson, and others, and to prepare a supplement to all the dictionaries, which should register all omitted words and senses, and supply all the historical information in which these works were lacking, and, above all, should give quotations illustrating the first and last appearance, and every notable point in the life-history of every word.

From this impulse arose the movement which, widened and directed by much practical experience, has culminated in the preparation of the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘A new English Dictionary on Historical Principles, founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society.’ This dictionary superadds to all the features that have been successively

evolved by the long chain of workers, the historical information which Dr. Trench desiderated. It seeks not merely to record every word that has been used in the language for the last 800 years, with its written form and signification, and the pronunciation of the current words, but to furnish a biography of each word, giving as nearly as possible the date of its birth or first known appearance, and, in the case of an obsolete word or sense, of its last appearance, the source from which it was actually derived, the form and sense with which it entered the language or is first found in it, and the successive changes of form and developments of sense which it has since undergone. All these particulars are derived from historical research; they are an induction of facts gathered by the widest investigation of the written monuments of the language. For the purposes of this historical illustration more than five millions of extracts have been made, by two thousand volunteer Readers, from innumerable books, representing the English literature of all ages, and from numerous documentary records. From these, and the further researches for which they provide a starting-point, the history of each word is deduced and exhibited.

Since the Philological Society's scheme was propounded, several large dictionaries have been compiled, adopting one or more of Archbishop Trench's suggestions, and thus showing some of the minor features of this dictionary. They have collected some of the rare and obsolete words and senses of the past three centuries; they have attained to greater fullness and

exactness in exhibiting the current uses of words, and especially of the many modern words which the progress of physical science has called into being. But they leave the history of the words themselves where it was when Dr. Trench pointed out the deficiencies of existing dictionaries. And their literary illustrations of the older words are, in too many cases, those of Dr. Johnson, copied from dictionary to dictionary without examination or verification, and, what is more important, without acknowledgement, so that the reader has no warning that a given quotation is merely second-or third-hand, and, therefore, to be accepted with qualification[15]. The quotations in the New English Dictionary, on the other hand, have been supplied afresh by its army of volunteer Readers; or, when for any reason one is adopted from a preceding dictionary without verification, the fact is stated, both as an acknowledgement of others' work, and as a warning to the reader that it is given on intermediate authority.

Original work, patient induction of facts, minute verification of evidence, are slow processes, and a work so characterized cannot be put together with scissors and paste, or run off with the speed of the copyist. All the great dictionaries of the modern languages have taken a long time to make; but the speed with which

the New English Dictionary has now advanced nearly to its half-way point can advantageously claim comparison with the progress of any other great dictionary, even when this falls far behind in historical and inductive character.[16] Be the speed what it may, however, there is the consideration that the work thus done is done once for all; the structure now reared will have to be added to, continued, and extended with time, but it will remain, it is believed, the great body of fact on which all future work will be built. It is never possible to forecast the needs and notions of those who shall come after us; but with our present knowledge it is not easy to conceive what new feature can now be added to English Lexicography. At any rate, it can be maintained that in the