more than average intelligence, yet within a few years of leaving school they as a rule acquire an uncouthness and impenetrability that makes them a class apart, with their own customs and code of honour, recognising only compulsory obligations to the rest of the community, whose thoughts and interests they make no claim to share. Later in life, perhaps, their intelligence may again develop under the stimulus of practical affairs, and there grows up the shrewd old countryman of whom everyone can recall one or two shining examples. The evil is wrought in those early years just after leaving school, when the boy is set to long hours of unintelligent routine work, when no stimulus reaches his mind, and only his growing appetites remind him that he is a man. It is the monotony that kills the intelligence, and in many districts farmers have acted with great unwisdom in trying deliberately to shut down young men's initiative and to reduce them to 'hands' rather than human beings. In some parts the labourers are not allowed to keep chickens or pigs, lest they should be tempted to steal corn; in others their attempts to learn the finer arts of the labourer, like land draining or measuring, are frowned upon because it might make them think they knew as much as their masters. With such factors at work above and below-masters striving to keep men from getting uppish, men inclined to find safety and wisdom in the maxim that such things are not for the likes of them-small wonder that a servile and stupid race grows up. Those men to whom a little energy or enterprise is left go to the Colonies, for the emigration agents are busy in all the villages and know both how to pick and how to persuade. The nation cannot afford to allow this waste of intelligence to proceed; the farmer himself will be the first to feel the need of brains in his labourers as the scarcity of them becomes acute, and their consequent higher price has to be compensated for by a more skilful utilisation of their powers What is necessary is to make the continuation school a reality in every village. In a few instances such schools exist, and the Board of Education has drawn up syllabuses and regulations that are reasonable enough, but scholars cannot be compelled to attend, and the local authorities are adverse to the expense of organising them properly. The establishment of such schools must be attended by some considerable expense, for

teachers who are engaged all day in their present duties cannot attack a further instalment of evening instruction with the freshness that is essential for classes of boys and girls who have begun their work in the world. The teaching should be unconventional and stimulating, some of it may be real-dealing with plants and animals-but no formal instruction in agriculture is desirable; what is needed is to keep the pupil's intelligence active and awake to the existence of a world outside his own immediate experience. Until continuation schools, both in town and country, are part of the normal educational fabric we shall fail to reap any adequate return for our expenditure on primary schools, and agriculture in particular will continue to be starved of the intelligence that lies dormant in the labouring classes.

It may seem but a lame conclusion that we can discern no ready road to the reform of agriculture, nothing but the slow and uphill path of ameliorating the intelligence of the men and women engaged in the industry. But farming is a business like any other, competing with other businesses for brains and capital, progressing and declining through the operation of economic factors that are difficult to diagnose, and still more difficult, even dangerous, to deal with legislatively. In Great Britain there are good and bad farms just as there are good and bad boot factories, good and bad lawyers' offices. In one mood we may deplore the extinction of the retail trader by the great stores, in another mood we may be roused to anger by the waste of energy and deplorable lack of intelligence displayed in a mean street of suburban shops; but we are not prepared either, on the one hand, to sweep up the little shops into great emporiums or to divide Harrods up into sections suitable for letting to the residents in the back streets of Pimlico or Chelsea. Let us deal with. agriculture like any other industry, and above all strive to make it offer a career for which young men will train themselves seriously. When we have enough good farmers to use the land of Great Britain to the best advantage, we may begin to dispute how it may most advantageously be divided up; meantime we shall be quite safe in concentrating our efforts on raising all our cultivators to the level of the more enlightened among them.

THE OXFORD DICTIONARY

A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society. Edited by SIR JAMES A. H. MURRAY, with the assistance of many scholars and men of science. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1884-1914 (in progress).

It is now gigantic work, which, when finished, will form the

is now thirty years since the first instalment appeared

most complete Thesaurus of the English language in existence and, indeed, the greatest dictionary of any language. It is more comprehensive than the admirable Deutsches Wörter'buch' of Grimm, the model of all later historical dictionaries, which began to appear in 1854 and, though already numbering thirteen volumes, is yet unfinished; it is far more voluminous than the great Dictionnaire de la Langue Française ' of Littré, published in four volumes between 1863 and 1872, with a supplementary volume dated 1878; and it is wider in its scope than either of them. For while Littré's French Dictionary commences only with the seventeenth century, and Grimm's German Dictionary goes back no farther than the middle of the fifteenth century, the plan of the 'New English Dictionary' covers the whole extent of the Middle and New English periods, from 1150 down to the present day. Any word which at any time belonged to the standard English vocabulary during these eight centuries is catalogued and discussed as to its historical development, no matter whether it is to-day living or obsolete. Thus the period of time embraced by the 'New 'English Dictionary' begins three centuries before Grimm's starting-point, and five centuries before that of Littré. Moreover, though the New English Dictionary' excludes words which became obsolete during the Anglo-Saxon period, yet the history of every word admitted into the Dictionary is given from its very first appearance in literature, and the possible changes of form and meaning a word may have undergone during the Anglo-Saxon period are dealt with no less thoroughly than those which it experienced in later times.

And while Grimm's Dictionary, especially in its earlier volumes, excludes many loanwords from foreign languages, although they may have become part and parcel of the German language, the New English Dictionary' draws the line much more liberally; all words that really belong to standard English speech are admitted into its columns, no puristic distinction being made between the vernacular and the borrowed element. If a word is rejected from the Dictionary it must be either because it is purely a dialect word and never used in literature at all, or purely foreign and only used by English writers as a quotation.

It is obvious that a work planned on such an enormous scale could not be undertaken without extraordinary preparations, nor carried out by a single individual. In point of fact no less than twenty-six years elapsed between the earliest gathering of materials and the publication of the first instalment of the Dictionary. The material which forms the basis of the whole work was collected by hundreds of readers; and though the definite shaping and making of the Dictionary is due to the ceaseless energy of one man, he has now for many years been assisted in his editorial work by two co-editors and a numerous staff of assistants.

It was in 1857 that the Philological Society, at the suggestion of the late Archbishop Trench, resolved that materials should 'be collected for a Dictionary which, by the completeness of its ' vocabulary, and by the application of the historical method 'to the life and use of words, might be worthy of the English 'language and of English scholarship.' For this purpose, illustrative quotations were to be extracted from all writers before the sixteenth century, and from as many as possible of the more important writers of later times. In 1858 the collection of materials began. Several hundred readers in the United Kingdom, in the British Colonies, in the United States, in fact all over the world, set to work, under the general editorship of Herbert Coleridge, and collected quotations from English writers of all ages, while a staff of competent scholars undertook to arrange the materials thus amassed. The first chief editor, Herbert Coleridge, died while preparing for the press some specimens showing the lines which he proposed to follow in dealing with the words. He was succeeded by Frederick J. Furnivall, who had already acted as sub-editor.

The process of collecting material went on for years and years; it took much more time and caused more trouble than had been anticipated at the outset. Slips were returned to Furnivall from all parts of the world, until more than two millions of quotations were collected. But though portions of this enormous material were roughly arranged and prepared for later use, the actual compilation of the Dictionary was as far off as ever, and the project seemed in danger of abandon

ment.

This was the state of things when a firm hand laid hold of the scheme and undertook the superintendence of the work.

In 1876, Messrs. Harper, the American publishers, communicated with Messrs. Macmillan concerning the plan of an International Dictionary' which was to compete with. Webster's well-known work, and the latter firm asked Dr. Richard Morris, the philologist, if he could recommend a competent editor. Morris proposed Dr. James A. H. Murray, a Scottish scholar, and member of the Philological Society.

Born in 1837 at Denholm, near Hawick, Roxburghshire, and since 1870 a master at Mill Hill School, Dr. Murray had, besides various papers in the Transactions of the Philological Society, published a book on 'The Dialect of the Southern 'Counties of Scotland' (1873), had edited 'The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune' (1875), and other works, for the Early English Text Society, and had written the article English Language' in the 'Encyclopædia 'Britannica.' He declared his willingness to undertake the task, but only if the work in question were to be bigger than Webster. When Messrs. Macmillan replied with an inquiry as to the existence of materials for a great historical dictionary, Dr. Murray told them all he knew about it. He then at their request wrote some specimen articles with the help of the materials of the Philological Society which Furnivall kindly put at his disposal. Thereupon Macmillans made Harpers a proposal for the joint publication of a big dictionary, according to the scheme laid down by Dr. Murray. But Harpers wanted the book to be smaller than Webster; so the negotiations fell through.

Dr. Murray now showed the specimen articles he had written to several members of the Philological Society, and, having