You cannot, of course, expect to make any original investigations in
language; but you can follow safe guides, such as shall lead you by
right paths, even as you may follow such as can only lead you astray.
Do not fail to keep in mind that perhaps in no region of human
knowledge are there such a multitude of unsafe leaders as in this; for
indeed this science of words is one which many, professing for it an
earnest devotion, have done their best or their worst to bring into
discredit, and to make a laughing-stock at once of the foolish and the
wise. Niebuhr has somewhere noted 'the unspeakable spirit of absurdity'
which seemed to possess the ancients, whenever they meddled with this
subject; but the charge reaches others beside them. Their mantle, it
must be owned, has in after times often fallen upon no unworthy
successors.
What is commoner, even now, than to find the investigator of words and
their origin looking round about him here and there, in all the
languages, ancient and modern, to which he has any access, till he
lights on some word, it matters little to him in which of these, more
or less resembling that which he wishes to derive? and this found, to
consider his problem solved, and that in this phantom hunt he has
successfully run down his prey. Even Dr. Johnson, with his robust,
strong, English common-sense, too often offends in this way. In many
respects his _Dictionary_ will probably never be surpassed. We shall
never have more concise, more accurate, more vigorous explanations of
the actual meaning of words, at the time when it was published, than he
has furnished.
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