their
respective departments.

The great work of Dr. FREUND is so well known to the best educated
scholars, as one of the most consummate specimens of German intellectual
enterprise and persistency, that it is hardly necessary to make more
than this passing allusion to its signal merits. Its indefatigable
author, pursuing the path marked out by Gesenius and Passow in Hebrew
and Greek lexicography, has opened a new era in the study of the Latin
Language, reduced it to a far more compact and orderly system, and
greatly facilitated the labors of those who wish to master the noble
treasures of its literature. His Lexicon, published at Leipsic in four
volumes, from 1834 to 1845, comprising nearly 4500 pages, has been made
the basis of the present work, the Editor, meantime, making use of the
best sources of information to be obtained in other quarters, including
the smaller School-Lexicon of Dr. Freund himself, and the dictionaries
of Gesner, Facciolati, Scheller, and Georges. He has aimed to condense
these abundant materials within the limits of a single volume, retaining
every thing of practical importance in the works from which they are
derived.

In pursuance of this method, Professor ANDREWS has given all the
definitions and philological remarks in Freund's larger Lexicon, with
his references in full to the original Latin authors, the grammarians,
editors, and commentators, retrenching from the citations whatever parts
seemed to be superfluous, and entirely omitting such as were redundant
or of comparatively trifling consequence. At the same time, he has
preserved the reference to the original Latin authorities, thus enabling
the student to examine the quotations at pleasure.

This Lexicon, like the Dictionary of Freund, on which it is founded,
accordingly, contains in its definitions, in its comparison of synonyms,
in its general philological apparatus, and in the number and variety of
its references to the original classic authors, an amount of information
not surpassed by any similar work extant, while in the luminous and
philosophical arrangement of its materials, it is without an equal among
the most complete productions in this department of study.

The learned Editor of this work, who has attained such a distinguished
reputation, as one of the soundest and most thorough Latin philologists
in the United States, has been assisted in its preparation by several
friends and associates of great literary eminence, a