and herein I have endeavoured to prove that this principle was of worldwide application, and that it is an etymological key which will open the meaning of many words still in common use. It is a correlative fact that the names of specific deities such as Horus, Hathor, Nina, Bel, etc., developed in course of time into generic terms for any _Lord_ or _God_. Very much the same principles are at work with us to-day, whence _a_ dreadnought from the prime "Dreadnought," and the etymologer of the future, who tries by strictly scientific methods to unravel the meaning of such words as _mackintosh_, _brougham_, _Sam Browne_, _gladstone_, _boycott_, etc., will find it necessary to investigate the legends attendant on those names rather than practice a formal permutation of vowels and consonants. By common consent the quintessence of the last fifty years' philological progress is being distilled into Sir James Murray's _New English Dictionary_, and in a conciser form the same data may be found in Prof. Skeat's _Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language_. Both these indispensable works are high watermarks of English scholarship, and whatever absurdities they contain are shortcomings not of their compilers but of the Teutonic school of philology which they exemplify. If these two standard dictionaries were able to answer even the elementary questions that are put to them it would be both idle and presumptuous to cavil, but one has only to refer to their pages to realise the ignorance which prevails as to the origin and the meaning of the most simple and everyday words. It is unfortunately true that "in philology as in all branches of knowledge it is the specialist who most strongly opposes any attempt to widen the field of his knowledge".[52] Hence, as was only to be expected, one of the reviewers of my _Lost Language of Symbolism_ deemed it quite insufferable that I should throw to the winds the laborious work on the science of phonetics built up by generations of careful research.