fanatical tendency, yet it will not be argued that it is for all such works, including the fanaticism of the Dominican, and including the fanaticism of the Thug.

Thus far the science of shells has brought us. It is time to check Philology by Lexicography.

FOURTH HEAD

THE PLAY UPON WORDS

Johnson's Dictionary.

1. The Missing Word.

-

2. Recurring Decimals. 2. A Puzzle for Atheists. 4. Plato Refuted by Plato. - 5. Books in Chains.

On reading this Will for the first time, and wondering what the word Idealistic meant to others than myself, I turned to an English dictionary.

I

The dictionary which I found to my hand happens to be the famous work of Doctor Johnson, or, to be more careful, one founded on that work by Doctor Latham, who was an esteemed philologist, and professor of the English language. It is in four vast volumes, published just fourteen years before the date of the Testator's death, by nineteen publishers,

and it should be fairly representative of the science and art of lexicography in England.

The words are taken in the order of their spelling; each one is given a Latin label such as substantive or adjective; if in its sound or spelling it shows the mark of the Roman mint a Mediterranean word is quoted as its original; then follows the explanation (the thing I was in search of)-and Johnson's Dictionary is renowned for its explanations; and lastly there come extracts from books in which the word is found.

These extracts were styled by Johnson his authorities. His whole habit of mind withheld him from seeing that the speech of the English folk is a higher authority than any book. "Of the laborious and mercantile part of the people (he writes), the diction is in a great measure casual and mutable. That is not so. The folk keep their native words much longer and much better than the bookmen. Hundreds of English words long buried under the dust of Dryasdust are coming to light, and are returning into English literature from the ends of the earth, today. Johnson, it is plain, could not rid himself of the old monkish way of looking at it. To him the right English was a barbarous provincial dialect; the language worthy of a scholar's attention was that which came closest to the Roman pattern. He has told us this, really, by calling his work a dictionary and not a wordbook.

The same wrongheadedness makes itself manifest in his treatment, and in Latham's treatment, of some words admitted to these volumes.

There are many words common to both the Baltic

and the Mediterranean; some of them common to every Aryan dialect; some of them older than the Aryan invasion, if there was an Aryan invasion, relics of the old stone-cutting race that crossed from Africa in the wake of the retreating ice. The Roman missionaries latinised some of these words, much as they christianised the pagan folklore. And so to-day the Johnsons and the Lathams mark as Roman importations words that are only Roman in the spelling, words that were rooted in the northern speech before one stone of Rome was laid upon another.

Many of the words thus treated dropped out of spoken English, and their place was taken by others whose outline was too stubborn to be effaced by foreign spelling. Thus the English folk, robbed of verihood by the monks, instinctively refused the Roman verity, and took refuge in truth.

If a man does not know these things by heart, if he has never caught a true glimpse into the history of words, what can he tell us about their meanings? If he cannot see that even the spellings, the outer shells of words, are often palimpsests in which the writing on the surface hides another and yet another writing underneath-if he cannot see this, how can we hope that his glance will be keener when he comes to consider the meaning which is the life of the word; and that his explanation of it will be anything better than the gabble of the Latin school?

I turned to Doctor Latham's volumes with misgiving, and the first discovery I made was an ominous one. The word used by Nobel was not there.

II

Instead I found this entry:

"Idealist substantive. Supporter of the doctrine of idealism."

The only inference was that a work of an idealistic tendency must be one supporting the same doctrine. I asked Doctor Latham what the doctrine was, and I got this answer:

Idealism. System of metaphysical philosophy founded upon the doctrine that the objects of the external world are what they are, less on the strength of any material properties of their own, than through the action of the mind, in which they exist as ideas."

At the first blush my plight seemed to be worse than Herakles', when he cut off the hydra's head; I had a dozen Babu words to deal with instead of one. I made shift to turn some of them into English.

"The stones and trees of the outside world are what they are, less on the strength of any stuff of their own, than through the working of the mind, in which they stand forth as-ideas.”

Before examining the doctrine further it seemed desirable to know Doctor Latham's meaning for the word idea. Here was the key-word. Without understanding it, it must be hard to understand Idealist.

I looked again, and found an explanation as short as the other had been long.