My book has met with much criticism, partly favourable, partly adverse, from different quarters. To my reviewers in general I offer my best thanks for their comments. The ‘Saturday Review’—and I say it the more readily as they will see that I have not been insensible to the value of their criticism—has not, I think, sufficiently understood the nature of my work. I am well aware that praise is due to them for having for some length of time strenuously advocated the claim of our language to be English through all its varying stages. I do not see that in the general character of my book I have lost sight of this fact. An ‘English Directory’ is not an ‘English Dictionary.’ The influences that have been at work on our language are not the same as those upon our nomenclature. Every social casualty had an effect upon our names which it could not have upon our words. The names found in Domesday Book, casting aside the new importation, were, in the great majority of cases, obsolete by the end of the twelfth century, and of those which have survived and descended to us as surnames, well-nigh all are devoid of diminutive or patronymic desinences—a clear proof that they were utterly out of fashion as personal names during the era of surname formation. The Norman invasion was not a conquest of our language, but it was of our nomenclature. The ‘Saturday Review’ may still demand that we shall view all as English, and obliterate the distinctive terms of Saxon and Norman, but in doing so let us not forget facts. The language which preceded the Norman Conquest is still the _vehicle_ of ordinary converse. The nomenclature of that period went down like Pharaoh’s chariot, and like Pharaoh’s chariot, which for all I know lies where it did, was never recovered.