1858.] Professor Wilson's Sanskrit Diet. 305 



names ; and it is no sufficient reason to reject them, that they 

 belonged mainly to misbelievers. To say nothing so special of the 

 other divinities, the spots held sacred to S'iva alone are all but 

 innumerable; and so are the phalli which bear separate desig- 

 nations. Once more, the eighty or ninety Sahasra-ndmas of them- 

 selves furnish as many thousand accredited epithets of gods and 

 goddesses. "Why should a single one of them be slighted ? 



Looking still more narrowly into Dr. G-oldstucker's undertaking, 

 it appears, in fact, to wear the pretensions of a veritable encyclo- 

 paedia ; bibliography and geography, no less than biography, consti- 

 tuting a componeut part of his comprehensive enterprise.* Upa- 

 nishads, sections of the Veda, apocryphal hymns, the Atri-sanhitd, 

 the Adohuta-ramayana, and the Anargliya-rdghava of Murari, all 

 have articles. As the number of distinct Sanskrit works in exist- 

 ence is, probably, not less than ten thousand, a mere list of them, 

 be it ever so meagre of details, would alone take up a volume. 



It must be obvious, by this time, that the system on which the 

 dictionary of Professor Wilson is undergoing reconstruction involves, 

 in copious proportion, many specialties that are altogether mis- 

 placed. The new edition, which aiming at much more than is 

 attempted in any rationally digested lexicon of Latin or Greek, yet 

 falls short of their standard in, at all events, one most essential 

 particular. "We mean, in its citing no authorities.f On countless 



* Our industrious Teuton appears, in truth, to have copied, however uncon- 

 sciously, the method of our English dictionaries, as they were loosely styled, 

 which preceded that of Johnson. These disorderly repertories, Dr. Trench 

 describes as being " not dictionaries of words only, but of persons, places, things : 

 they are gazetteers, mythologies, scientific encyclopaedias, and a hundred things 

 more ; all, of course, most imperfectly, even according to the standard of know- 

 ledge of their own time, and with a selection utterly capricious of what they put 

 in, and what they leave out." On some Deficiencies, &c, p. 45. 



f The learned and judicious critic already twice cited speaks for all the world, 

 equally as for himself, — the sciolists who cling to the shade of Dr. Webster 

 excepted, — when he says : " To me there is no difference between a word absent 

 from a dictionary, and a word there, but unsustained by an authority. Even if 

 Webster's Dictionary were in other respects a better book, the almost total 

 absence of illustrative quotations would deprive it of all value in my eyes." On 

 some Deficiencies, &c, p. 7, foot-note. 



