354 Dr. J. A. E. Murray [May 22, 



stage in the development of lexicography, in which the treatment 

 becomes strictly historical, and the dictionary comes to be truly a 

 history of every English word, telling of its age, its source, the 

 circumstances in which it arose in English or came into English, its 

 original form and sense, and all the changes of form and develop- 

 ment of sense that it has passed through. As this means an enormous 

 collection of facts — for history consists wholly of facts and inferences 

 from facts — the work was, of course, far beyond what could be over- 

 taken by any one man. Accordingly, at the suggestion of the late 

 Archbishop Trench, then Dean of Westminster, the whole English- 

 speaking world was invited to co-operate in this great task, and more 

 than two thousand men and women have actually lent their aid in 

 systematically reading and excerpting some 100,000 books, and thus 

 furnishing the six millions of quotations which supply the facts 

 required ; in arranging these in alphabetical order, in classifying 

 them chronologically and according to their senses, in sub-editing 

 sections of the alphabet, and preparing them for final editorial 

 treatment. It would have been of interest, if time had allowed me, to 

 detail the methods by which this has been done, to tell of the 

 multitude of readers, of the number of scholars and men of technical 

 knowledge who have put their special knowledge at our disposal, of 

 the many curious things that have happened to us in the course 

 of twenty years ; but it is really not possible, in a discourse upon 

 dictionaries generally, to give a full account of the ideal dictionary, 

 and as my time is exhausted I will only put on the screen a few of 

 the slides which give a glimpse of certain phases of the work.* 



These show portraits of Dr. Trench, Mr. Herbert Coleridge, and 

 Dr. F. J. Furnivall, great names in the history of the Philological 

 Society's preparatory work ; views of the interior of the original 

 Scriptorium at Mill Hill, of a corner of that at Oxford showing the 

 pigeon-holes full of slips, and the editorial staff at work ; copies of 

 the slips themselves of various kinds, ordinary and extraordinary; 

 autograph letters on dictionary matters from George Eliot and 

 Lord Tennyson ; pages of the dictionary in proof, in revise, and in 

 final. 



The second half of the nineteenth century has seen the under- 

 taking of four great dictionaries of the modern languages, which are 

 naturally compared with the New English Dictionary. The famous 

 German dictionary, Deutsches Worterhuch, of Jacob and Wilhelm 



* The discourse up to this point had been illustrated by photographic lantern 

 slides of exami>les of Old English glosses and beautiful glossed manuscripts, 

 of the Old and Middle English manuscript glossaries and vocabularies referred 

 to, quaint title-] )age8 and interesting typical pages or openings of the early 

 dictionaries, Latin-English, English-Latin, English-Foreign, and of all the 

 Seventeenth and Eighteenth century dictionaries mentioned, with portraits of 

 dictionary-makers, ancient and modern. Portraits of the Brothers Grimm and 

 of M. Littrc' were also shown later. 



