7H 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



straight. The remarkable feature in this 

 jaw is the series of premolar and molar 

 teeth. These were very numerous, appar- 

 ently as many as twelve in all, possibly 

 more. In comparing this fossil with the 

 forms already known, it is seen to differ 

 widely from any living type. Its nearest 

 affinities are with the genus Stylodon of 

 Owen, and in many respects the correspond- 

 ence is close. 



In the " American Journal of Science," 

 for September, Professor Marsh describes 

 two lower jaws belonging to animals ap- 

 parently of the same genus (Dryolestes) as 

 the first American Jurassic mammal ; these 

 remains came from the same locality and 

 horizon as the preceding. These new spe- 

 cimens furnish important characters to dis- 

 tinguish the genus. In one of them the 

 angle of the lower jaw is strongly inflected, 

 thus indicating its marsupial nature. The 

 other proves that the genus is quite dis- 

 tinct from Didelphys, as there were at least 

 four premolars. This specimen differs from 

 the jaws of Dryolestes prisons (the first Ju- 

 rassic mammal found in this country) in 

 being more slender, less curved, and less 

 compressed. Professor Marsh gave to the 

 species the name Dryolestes vorax. The 

 animal appears to have been smaller than 

 D. prisons. 



Classification of Words by Ideas. At 



the recent Philological Convention at New- 

 port, Mr. Stephen Pearl Andrews read an 

 interesting paper proposing some further 

 development of views previously suggested 

 regarding the classification of terms by the 

 ideas they represent, and he showed that 

 the process already begun is capable of 

 being carried to a far greater degree of 

 simplification than has yet been reached. 

 Mr. Andrews's paper was to the effect that 

 there are two possible ways of pursuing 

 the study of words, one of which only has 

 heretofore been brought into use, and the 

 adoption of the other one of which will con- 

 stitute a new method and a new era in phil- 

 ology. These two ways are 1. To study 

 the word, as a bundle of sounds, the body 

 of the word first, and in the main, and the 

 idea or meaning of the word in a secondary 

 and incidental manner merely ; and, 2. To 

 etudy the idea embodied in the word, as 



the main thing, making the phonetic struc- 

 ture of the word secondary and accessory 

 to the word. The first of these methods 

 Mr. Andrews calls historical or physical, 

 and the second ideological or psychical. 

 The historical method is the current and 

 triumphant method, initiated by Jacob 

 Grimm, and now completed, in a sense, by 

 August Fick, in the supplement to his dic- 

 tionary of the Indo-Germanic language, 

 where he sums up the root-words as a mere 

 handful (50 to 500), from which all the 

 words (virtually) ever spoken in southern 

 and western Asia, and in Europe, are de- 

 rived. This historical method Mr. Andrews 

 also calls, therefore, the German method, 

 and he thinks it has now achieved nearly 

 all that it is able to do. 



The ideological method has hardly yet 

 been begun, and remains now to be elabo- 

 rated. It was, however, unconsciously ini- 

 tiated by Noah Webster, in the introduc- 

 tion to his dictionary, while he was working 

 for a quite different purpose, and may 

 therefore be called, for easy distinction, 

 the American method. As Fick reduces 

 all the words we use to a mere handful, so 

 Webster, on the other hand, reduces the 

 meanings of all these words to a group of 

 thirty-four leading ideas, a less number than 

 that of Fick's root-words. Both the Ger- 

 man and the American method are, there- 

 fore, traveling on the road to lingual unifi- 

 cation, or, what is the same thing, to the 

 reduction of language to an ultimate sim- 

 plification. On the side of ideas this is 

 the same as what the metaphysicians have 

 sought to do, working abstractly, with their 

 categories. 



At this point, Mr. Andrews himself 

 takes up the subject, on the side of ideas, 

 or the American method, and pushes the 

 simplification down to its utmost. He ana- 

 lyzes and further generalizes Webster's thir- 

 ty-four classes of ideas, reducing them all 

 to three grand major classes : 1. The idea 

 of division or apartness (of, off, fromness) ; 

 2. The idea of unity or togetherness (at, to, 

 with) ; and 3. The idea of vacillation be- 

 tween those two. These three ideas Mr. 

 Andrews identifies with the differentiation 

 and integration of Herbert Spencer, and with 

 the coaction or interrelationship between 

 those two ideas. 



