to make almost unaided by previous explorers. The science of comparative
philology is of later birth; the English of Webster's day were no better
equipped than he for the task which he undertook, except so far as they
were trained by scholarship to avoid an empirical method. Horne Tooke
was the man who opened Webster's eyes, and him he followed so long as
he followed anybody. But Tooke was a guesser, and Webster, with all his
deficiencies, had always a strong reliance upon system and method. He
made guesses also, but he thought they were scientific analyses, and he
came to the edge of real discoveries without knowing it.

The fundamental weakness of Webster's work in etymology lay in his
reliance upon external likenesses and the limitation of his knowledge to
mere vocabularies. It was not an idle pedantry which made him marshal an
imposing array of words from Oriental languages; he was on the right
track when he sought for a common ground upon which Indo-European
languages could meet, but he lacked that essential knowledge of
grammatical forms, without which a knowledge of the vocabulary is liable
to be misleading. His comparison of languages may be compared to the
earlier labors of students in comparative anatomy who mistook merely
external resemblances for structural homology. It would be idle to
institute any inquiry into the agreement of the 1828 edition with the
latest edition. All of Webster's original work, as he regarded it, has
been swept away, and the etymology reconstructed by Dr. Mahn, of Berlin,
in accordance with a science which did not exist in Webster's day. The
immense labor which Webster expended remains only as a witness to that
indomitable spirit which enabled him to keep steadfastly to his
self-imposed task through years of isolation.

The definitions in Webster's first edition offer an almost endless
opportunity for comment. He found Johnson's definitions wanting in
exactness, and often rather explanations than definitions. For his part
he aimed at a somewhat plainer work. He was under no temptation, as
Johnson was, to use a fine style, but was rather disposed to take
another direction and use an excessive plainness of speech, amplifying
his definition by a reference in detail to the synonymous words. It must
be said, however, that Webster was often unnecessarily rambling in his
account of a word, as when, for instance, under the word _magnanimity_
he writes: "Greatness of mind; that elevation or d