74 



[June 18, 



adjunct, but the work can go on without them. Nothing but the Alcmala 

 of ruinous taxation, or the substitution of a tax on exports for the proper 

 tax on imports, as was done under the corrupt rule of the nionarchs who 

 ruined Spain, can destroy indigenous or thoroughly nationalized industries 

 such as these. 



The foundation industries in wool, cotton and silk have come here to 

 stay ; they have come from England first, and next from Germany and 

 from France ; and they already furnish an addition of many thousands of 

 trained adults, men and women, to the body of the population of the 

 greater cities of the United States. 



Mr. Phillips called to the attention of the Society the new 

 Dictionary of the English Language which was now ap- 

 proaching its completion. 



The first germ of the project grew out of a paper read before the Philo- 

 logical Society in 1857, by Archbishop Trench, on "Some deficiencies in 

 our English Dictionaries." The Society, subsequently, in 1859, issued a 

 " Proposal for the publication of a New English Dictionary," in which the 

 general scope and method of the intended work were set forth. The heavy 

 financial outlay requisite and other obstructing causes retarded the work 

 till about three years ago, when Dr. J. A. H. Murray, President of the Phi- 

 lological Society and Master of the great Mill Hill School, in London, took 

 up the management and infused a new vigor into the undertaking. The 

 plan is to furnish a history of each word in the English language, with a 

 quotation from some author in every century since its first appearance, 

 thus showing the date of its entrance, and the progressive changes, if any, 

 which have occurred in its form and meaning. According to the materials 

 already in hand, giving a sentence for every citation, the Dictionary would 

 fill seven quarto volumes of 2000 pages each, but the intention is to reduce 

 the quotations, when it can be done, to a smaller compass, thus keeping it 

 Avithin the trivial limit of "7000 quarto pages of the size of Littre's French 

 Dictionary, making a work one and a half times the size of that, or more than 

 four times the size of Webster, say in four thick volumes quarto. ' ' The book 

 will be published at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, and the intention is that 

 it shall be completed within ten years. The first part of 400 pages contain- 

 ing the letter a. is to be ready in 1882, the residue to follow at regular inter- 

 vals until the whole is finished. The supervision of the reading for the 

 Dictionary done in Amei'ica, has been confided to our fellow-member. Pro- 

 fessor March, of Easton, Pa., who has awakened and stimulated the in- 

 terest in this country, so that from Maine to Oregon daily contributions of 

 quotations are pouring in to the learned editor. 



When finished, the Dictionary will be one of the great books of the 

 world, a stupendous monument for all time to the industry, zeal and learn- 

 ing of the scholars of the nineteenth century. 



A letter was read from Mr. Eli K. Price suggesting that 



