led, adopting one or more of Archbishop
Trench's suggestions, and thus showing some of the minor features of
this dictionary. They have collected some of the rare and obsolete
words and senses of the past three centuries; they have attained to
greater fullness and exactness in exhibiting the current uses of
words, and especially of the many modern words which the progress of
physical science has called into being. But they leave the _history_
of the words themselves where it was when Dr. Trench pointed out the
deficiencies of existing dictionaries. And their literary
illustrations of the older words are, in too many cases, those of Dr.
Johnson, copied from dictionary to dictionary without examination or
verification, and, what is more important, without acknowledgement, so
that the reader has no warning that a given quotation is merely
second-or third-hand, and, therefore, to be accepted with
qualification[15]. The quotations in the New English Dictionary, on
the other hand, have been supplied afresh by its army of volunteer
Readers; or, when for any reason one is adopted from a preceding
dictionary without verification, the fact is stated, both as an
acknowledgement of others' work, and as a warning to the reader that
it is given on intermediate authority.

Original work, patient induction of facts, minute verification of
evidence, are slow processes, and a work so characterized cannot be
put together with scissors and paste, or run off with the speed of the
copyist. All the great dictionaries of the modern languages have taken
a long time to make; but the speed with which the New English
Dictionary has now advanced nearly to its half-way point can
advantageously claim comparison with the progress of any other great
dictionary, even when this falls far behind in historical and
inductive character.[16] Be the speed what it may, however, there is
the consideration that the work thus done is done once for all; the
structure now reared will have to be added to, continued, and extended
with time, but it will remain, it is believed, the great body of fact
on which all future work will be built. It is never possible to
forecast the needs and notions of those who shall come after us; but
with our present knowledge it is not easy to conceive what new feature
can now be added to English Lexicography. At any rate, it can be
maintained that in the Oxford Dictionary, permeated as it is through
and through with the scientific metho