Etymology, in this period of its development, leads, of course, but a vagrant life, and neither receives nor deserves much respect. It may be found in this form now in any rural district, making its home at the house of the town-wit, the country doctor, or the village pedagogue. Nothing is aimed at in this style of etymologizing, beyond the excitement of others' curiosity, or the show of a little learning or of a little wit; and it is but the demonstration of some momentary, frivolous or selfish impulse, out of which nothing great or good was ever born.

In the second phase of its existence, that of literary empiricism, its nature is no higher than in the first, but only its position. It no longer wanders about unwritten, from mouth to mouth, but has a fixed habitation upon the lettered page. It has passed with favor or indulgence, the ordeal of deliberate scrutiny, and been exalted on account of its supposed worthiness, to an intended seat of high and permanent honor. Such etymologies, lexicographers and others glean sometimes with great care from standard authors; but they are all empirical in their own nature, and worthless. Science has foundations of its own, which are divine, and its character can neither be made nor unmade by those who describe it. Truth is still truth, however it is overlooked, and error cannot be sanctified by being exalted. into a high position, or by being worshipped by a crowd of false admirers. In this meagre, false, empirical state, classical etymology has wholly existed, until of late, and in fact exists almost wholly now. Mere orthographical or orthoepical resemblances suffice among empirics, to introduce, without further philological inquiry, any word into their magic circle of approved guesses and fancies. A radical difference of meaning in the case is as readily disposed of by them, as was any antithesis of fact and theory by the ancient philosophers; since they are utterly ignorant of that elementary doctrine of all true philology, that every word has a fundamental theme or base which determines absolutely its personal identity; and since, like phrenologists, they have a system of ideas, every one of which has a double polarity in

it, by which it can be accommodated to any position or motion desired. The celebrated etymology of "lucus,” a grove, 66 a non lucendo," from its not having any light, illustrates the ease with which such minds can weave positive and negative ideas together, into the meshes of their theories.

The first step taken in classical etymology was of this simple empirical kind. The second step forward in Latin etymology was taken so feebly as to be rather the manifestation of a desire for progression, though in quite blind unconsciousness where or how to make it: that of introducing, on a very limited scale, some simple Greek correspondences, and in a very cautious manner and one not involving any idea of their mutual relation. From this advance was realized only the slender advantage of informing such minds as had not before observed the wide and wonderful plexus of unities and analogies covering both languages, that they had had at some time a blended life and a strong, mutually penetrative influence on each other. The third step was one entirely false in its whole theory, and in all the results achieved under it; it was that of deriving the Latin immediately from the Greek. This was the prevailing conception of the relation of the two languages, at the beginning of this century, among the best scholars.

As for lexicography, it is, in our best Latin, Greek, and English dictionaries, far behind the present advanced state of philology. The etymologies to be found, at this moment, in the leading classical dictionaries of the world, are almost wholly those which are self-evident; while the small remainder is composed of mere guesses, derived from no philosophical principles, and suggesting none. Beyond this narrow range of etymological simplicities and novelties, the rest of the language stretches out before the lexicographer's eye, and, under his influence, before that of the student also, as a broad waste of unknown land. A true map, indeed, of the present state of classical etymology, as presented in our best dictionaries, would be as comical, to one at all acquainted with Indo-European philology, as a Chinese map of the world to one versed in geography. It would be a map of everything as it is not, and of no

thing as it is. Freund represents the best development, as a whole, of Latin lexicography, hitherto; Passow, as improved by Rost and others, that of Greek; and Webster, that of English. These all performed great labors, and achieved great results; and their names will ever stand high on the list of man's benefactors. But on none of them had the splendid orb of modern philology risen in its strength. It was in 1833 that Bopp began to publish that great work, his Comparative grammar, which in the department of language, like Bacon's Novum Organon in that of physical science, lighted the world on the way to a new era. And yet Freund, whose eyes actually beheld the rising dawn of comparative philology, the only one of the three lexicographers mentioned, whose feet stood, consciously, upon the margin of the new order of linguistic researches and results, had just closed his long labors, at this very time, and, in January, 1834, wrote his preface to his finished' work, by way of better introducing it to the world. In the following few words, he discloses the true attitude of his mind, viz.: "the question of the origin of the Latin language, is beginning to be far more involved, than many are willing to believe. Germanism is opposing the Sanscrit, with powerful weapons, and urges its claims to be the origin of Latin. The author therefore feels that he would be called overhasty, if he allowed the Sanscrit or the German element to have the predominance in his work." In the light of the present hour, how strange, even to ridiculousness, seems this language. It is by such strong high waymarks, standing up in the past, that we can best realize how great progress has been made, during the last quarter of a century, as in everything else, so also in the elements and processes of classical study. To dress, now, Latin lexicography in the etymology of Freund's day, when such a man as he thought that it was quite as likely as not that the Latin was but a child of the German, that had been lost in other days, but was now found again,

1 The first volume was published in 1834, but the work was not completed till 1845.-EDS.

would be like undertaking to dress a full grown man, of our day, in the clothes of some petty underling that lived half a century ago. Our lexical Latin etymology wears, therefore, to one whose eye is open to the charms and claims of Indo-European philology, the most grotesque Lilliputian dimensions; casting the reproach of its dwarfishness. and deformity upon the whole aspect of the lexicography into which it is introduced. In Freund's day, Döderlein's star was in the ascendant, in etymology, who published his Lateinische synonyme and etymologieen in 1826. He derived the Latin immediately from the Greek, so far as he could either find or devise any similarity between them. And many and great were the tortuosities of his inventive genius in working its way through such a labyrinthine experiment. The Latin and the Greek are sister languages, the Latin being the elder sister of the two, and having, in its form and face and character, much more resemblance to their still elder sister the Sanscrit, and so to their common parent, than the Greek. Of what greater absurdity, therefore, could an etymologist be guilty, than that of undertaking to represent the Latin, the elder sister, as the daughter of the Greek, the younger sister? With much labor in so false a direction, Döderlein succeeded in building up, in his various works, a vast pile of learned and ingenious, but false and worthless, novelties and blunders; a remarkable specimen of a patient, vigorous, enthusiastic scholar, industriously misspending all his days. There was great elaboration in the argument of his life, but it was developed, throughout, from entirely wrong premises. Through Freund's deference to his false views, he has been permitted to perpetuate the blight of his errors, through this generation and perhaps through another, upon the scholarship of other lands than his own, where the light of better minds has sufficed to supersede forever the false glare of his philological misconceptions. To Freund we must give, however, the credit of having uttered his deep sense of the want of a true etymology. He says that "a scientific exhibition of the genealogy of words is needed, but hitherto [1833] has not been

formed into a separate department, of the general science of language, as it ought to be. In time there must and will, without doubt, be found a genealogy of words, which shall take its place, as a science, by the side of lexicography." But in the few correspondences of the Latin with the Greek which Freund ventured to indicate, how narrow was the prospect that he opened, of their really wide and wonderful relations! And what an utter want of any system for its facts, and of any solution for its difficulties. In this period of well nigh universal darkness in philology, but twenty-five years ago, the field of classical etymology, was a favorite hunting ground for every sort of linguistic vagary, by all kinds of scholastic pretenders, who kept ever doubling, again and again, upon their own tracks, and ended all their toils only in making game of themselves to every intelligent beholder. Many, like Döderlein, derived the Latin from the Greek. Schwenck published, in 1827, an etymological Latin dictionary, in German, deriving the Latin from the Greek, for the most part; but sometimes also from the German. But, while its references to the Greek are somewhat copious, they have no scientific basis, and are all empirical, and many of them far-fetched and false. Valpy also published, in English, a Latin etymological dictionary, in the same spirit and with the same faults as Schwenck. "It will be said," he says, "that there are numerous words which we cannot show to be taken from the Greek. Doubtless it is so, although the number of such words is constantly decreasing." For works based on such fundamentally wrong ideas, both of these dictionaries possess much scholarly merit.

Others, like Jäkel, in his "germanische ursprung der lateinischen Sprache" (in 1830), undertook, like one hunting for eggs among ashes, to find the origin of the Latin in the old Gothic; others still, like the great Gesenius, derived it, very largely, from the Hebrew. Nork, accordingly, prepared a Latin dictionary on this basis; and to one, whose philological views are full enough to enable him to appreciate the real quality of the book, it is full of all humorous elements.

A brief quotation will show, at once, his position.