Short Notices [pp. 580-590]

Short Notices.
this retirement they were called in 1841 by the new king of
Prussia, who put an end to their continual anxiety about the
means of subsistence and gave them an honourable position as
Academicians and Professors at the University.
It was in 1837, when they returned from G~ittingen, that a
Leipzig publisher proposed to them to engage in the preparation of a great German Dictionary. With some reluctance
they assented; and after the lapse of seventeen years, and
through the assistance of more than a hundred scholars all
over Germany, we are now in possession of the first volume.
Were we to tell about it all that is ready to leap from the point
of our pen, of the satisfaction and the disappointment we have
experienced in glancing over the columns of this long expected
work, this notice would soon swell into an article of no ordinary length. This Word-book is not a della Crusca, nor is it
like the Dictionary of the French Academy, nor could it be
compared to Johnson or Webster; it is sui generis; the only
work to which we would even attempt to place it parallel, is
Richardson's English Dictionary; but still the likeness would
be a remote one. The examples form the great bulk of the
book; and yet these are selected from a curious range of authors, arbitrarily fixed as to its beginning, arbitrarily stopped,
and arbitrarily selected. The etymology, the very eye of the
work, is bright of aspect, keen of penetration, and large of
scope. The definitions are mostly given in Latin, sometimes
in German, sometimes in French, Spanish, Italian, and even
Lithuanian, and a great many times not at all. In short, it is
a great, it is a learned work, such as the Grimms alone could
produce. A Dizetzonary in the common acceptation of the term,
a work for the various general purposes of consultation, for
natives or foreigners, it is not.
Ueber den Naturlaut, von J. C. E. Buschmann. Berlin, 1853. Quarto.
Everybody is acquainted with lists of words of different languages, made out to exhibit a certain affinity between those
languages or groups of languages. The nature of this affinity
is not determined by the similarity or identity of certain words
expressing the same idea in different languages. For a word
may be simply borrowed; such terms as alkali, oxygen, jungle,
tattoo, violoncello, dragoman, would be no proofs whatever of
any connection between the English and the Arabic, Greek,
Hindustani, Polynesian, Italian, and Turkish languages; a single
individual may transfer such a word from one country or language into another. Or a word may be derived from another
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