PRESENT PROBLEMS OF ROMANCE PHILOLOGY 265 



renowned university, Tobler has continued to give forth a series of 



contributions to the learned literature of Romance syntax such as 



have transformed the whole complexion of many of the procedures and 



methods of this study. From being too often a field for the arbitrary 



or inherited dicta of observers who delight in the formulation of 



purely metaphysical distinctions, Tobler has made of Romance 



syntax a richly cultivated demesne in which the application of the 



comparative method and the substitution of psychological for 



metaphysical data, have combined to produce a body of sound 



doctrine suited to command the admiration and gratitude of the 



entire race of philologists. Yet such is the boundless extent of the 



domain included in Romance syntax that, far from exhausting any 



department of the subject, Tobler's greatest merit, perhaps, consists 



in having pointed the way to the solution of manifold problems that 



still await the application of his methods and the utilization of the 



data so abundantly furnished by him. It cannot, however, be said 



that the force of his teaching and the stimulus of his example have 



yet borne the fruit that might have been hoped for, in equipping a 



body of young disciples for the continuance and spread of his peculiar 



work. Much less have the results of his investigations found sufficient 



recognition in the more popular treatises on the subject intended 



for practical instruction; and there is perhaps no field of philological 



research in which there is so urgent a call for promising recruits 



equipped with the historical spirit and fitted by training in historical 



methods, to carry on the tradition of the highest and best scholarship. 



Fortunately, the recently completed third volume of Meyer-Liibke's 



comprehensive grammar of the Romance languages presents in 



systematic form, in connection with much that is original, the best 



and most significant results of Tobler's teaching in this field. 



When we arrive at the branch of lexicology, with its practical 

 embodiment in the work of lexicography, we find ourselves face to 

 face with an enormous output, the material of which it will be 

 largely the task of the future to correct, to amplify, and to recast. 

 Without adverting to the monumental Dictionarium mediae et infimae 

 Latinitatis of Du Cange, dating, like the etymological dictionary of 

 Manage, from the seventeenth century, it will be interesting to us to 

 see how the great Etymologisches Worterbuch of Diez was virtually 

 recast in the Lateinisch-romanisches Worterbuch of Korting. While 

 the profoundest of scholars, Diez was the most unpractical of men, 

 and this latter fact is strikingly exemplified in the disposition and 

 arrangement of his Etymological Dictionary. Nothing, indeed, could 

 well have been more inconvenient and vexatious. The work was 

 divided into two volumes, the first containing the words common 

 to at least two of the three leading groups of the Romance languages, 

 while the second volume was divided into three parts, under which 



