Sanscrit Writing and Language. Ill 



guishes between the Ancients and Diogenianus, it appears that the third kind of 

 compilation did not commence very long before the age in which he lived ;* and 

 from his describing the first specimen of it as so complete, it is plain, his own 

 collection could not have been much more comprehensive as to the subjects it 

 embraced. The celebrated work, therefore, of Hesychius, as it came from the 

 hands of this grammarian, must be considered to have been confined, if not to 

 the more difficult and obscure words, at least to those peculiar to the different 

 branches of literature ; and not looked on as a general vocabulary of his language. 

 Nor does the present state of the book afford any argument to the contrary ; for 

 the MS. copy from which it was printed, — the only one known to be extant, — 

 was written about the year 1400, that is, probably near a thousand years after the 

 time of the author ; and how much a work of this kind must have been extended 

 and enlarged in the numerous transcriptions of it which necessarily took place in 

 so long an interval, may be easily conceived. Besides, even so late as the year 

 1514, when it was first printed, it received considerable additions from Musurus, 

 a native of Crete, to whose care it was committed by Aldus to prepare it for the 

 press ; so that its completion must be referred to the sixteenth century, and we 

 are not warranted in ranking it, as it was originally formed, under a more 

 advanced class than that which I have distinguished as the third species of com- 

 pilation. We have, therefore, still one step higher to ascend before we arrive at 

 a dictionary. 



That I might avoid any interruption to the course hitherto pursued in this 

 inquiry, I omitted to mention the Onomasticon of Julius Pollux in the order of 

 its date ; because it is not in strictness of the nature of a dictionary, being com- 

 posed of books, written in the form of separate treatises, which are digested 

 according to subjects, not according to alphabetical arrangement ; the words 

 which relate to each subject being brought together, and their differences 



extract. I should not have thought this correction worth noticing except to show, that Hesychius 

 does not here supply any ground for supposing that the third stage of the invention in question was 

 ancient In his time. 



* This agrees with the account of Suidas, who states that Diogenianus flourished In the reign of 

 the Emperor Adrian ; and shows that if another person of the same name was the author of the 

 compilation in question (on which point Suidas expresses some doubt), he still could not have been 

 very distant In time from this one. 



