Birds and all Nature Vol VII, No. 3, March 1900

Heredity does a great deal, but most of the lesson has to be taught over to every individual, and it is a more important one than geography or grammar. Humanity's happiness and further progress depend on the thoroughness with which it learns the lesson, not of arithmetic or spelling, but of altruism.

Children are cruel. But they have hereditary instincts of kindness for the weak that would develop the sooner into love for their fellows if they had something helpless to exercise them on. When a big, hulking, selfish boy begins to take a protecting interest in a little yellow dog he is unconsciously teaching himself the greatest lesson he can ever learn. Trotting around in that woolly hide, dodging stones, fleeing to him for protection from the poundman, getting lost, and kicked, starved, and hurt, is the beginning of the boy's unselfishness and the man's altruism, and it is not funny, but sad, that the schoolhouse door must shut it out so that the reluctant master may the better give his attention to the mysteries of commercial arithmetic and the art of skinning his fellow-man by means of "brokerage," "discount," and "compound interest."

Dr. Hale may never see animal pets in the schools, but he has been in the world a long time, and knows what humanity needs.

BAILEY'S DICTIONARY

C. C. MARBLE

THIS may be called the age of dictionary making. All philological scholarship seems to culminate in historic derivation. Without referring invidiously to cultivated foreign languages, each of which has many such monuments of elaborate, accurate, and patient research, it may be said with confidence that the English language is unrivaled in its lexicographers, who at the close of the nineteenth century have completed works which only a few decades ago were not thought of as possible. Dr. Johnson prepared his unabridged dictionary in seven years "with little assistance from the great," an achievement which at the time excited wonder and admiration, though insignificant indeed in comparison with present performances. And yet there may be some doubt about the comparatively greater usefulness to the general reader of the bulky volumes of the modern publishers. In illustration the reader might find an analysis of one of the oldest English dictionaries an interesting example.

For several years I have had at hand "An Universal Etymological English Dictionary and Interpreter of Hard Words," by N. Bailey, 1747. On almost all occasions when I have needed to consult a dictionary I have found it satisfactory, some of its learning, on account of its very quaintnesses and contemporaneous character, being better adapted to a particular definition than modern directness. Perhaps its greatest defect is the absence from it of scientific terms, of which, however, there were very few at that time.

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