6 THE POLYNESIAN WANDERINGS. 



so satisfactory to himself, that he feels justified in entitling his 

 latest work "The Oceanic Languages — Origin," rather than the 

 dictionary of Efate, which it really is. His Semitic theory we shall 

 have to study in a later chapter of this work; at this point we feel 

 it proper to comment upon the work as dictionary alone and freed 

 from its speculative adornments. 



An initial and serious objection to the work is that it is devoid 

 of even the slightest summary or sketch of the grammar of the 

 language. True there is an introductory section of well nigh a 

 hundred pages to which a hint in the title points as grammar. Yet 

 in the whole treatise there is not so much as a single page by read- 

 ing which the student may arrive at any comprehension of the 

 manner in which to combine into sentences the words so plentifully 

 listed in the vocabulary; there is no hint by which he may be 

 directed in the use of these many words as actual speech expressive 

 of the thoughts he would convey. Despite its presence where a 

 grammar is properly to be expected, this assemblage of introductory 

 chapters is the argument of a fine-spun theory, interesting to phi- 

 lologists, yet wholly useless lumber to the person who must rely 

 upon this work as his introduction to the speech of Efate. 



So little has Dr. Macdonald understood the proper purpose of a 

 dictionary-maker that he will not even head his vocabulary for what 

 it really is, but prefers the polemical statement of his dear theory in 

 the title "The Oceanic Languages, their Material or Vocabulary Set 

 Forth in a Complete Dictionary Comparative and Etymological of 

 One of Them, the Language of Efate. " It is only as an afterthought, 

 deferred to the last possible moment, that the man who has spent 

 more than a generation in the study consents to affix its title to the 

 really valuable part of his work. 



Such a mental attitude on the part of a lexicographer, the gran- 

 deur of his privilege to record that which is being so completely 

 obscured in his zeal to register what he fondly imagines ought to 

 be, is difficult of comprehension to those of us who content our- 

 selves through busy years of dictionary-making. Yet this attitude 

 is not new with Dr. Macdonald; it is well known that Webster 

 refused to sully the first edition of his great dictionary of the English 

 language by including the word "bridegroom," which merely existed 

 in English speech and had no right to exist, yet in the end he failed 

 to secure currency for "bridegoom." With this record of lexico- 

 graphic pertinacity we are ready to make due allowances for the 

 outcrop of the theory which to Dr. Macdonald means so much. 



To what extent this dictionary answers the author's character- 

 ization of "complete" we have no means of ascertaining. I prefer 

 to record the fact that it contains 3,657 word entries, a fact estab- 

 lished by my own tally. This gives us a positive measure r and 



