The ones who have properly sinned the most against the German language, and against those who understand no other, are the natural-historians, who--e. g. Alexander von Humboldt--import the whole Latin Linnæus into the midst of our language, without any other German signs of distinction than the final flourishes of German terminations, or tail-feathers, wherewith, however, they are as little intelligible to the mere speaker of German as a man would be to a stranger behind him through his mere queue. Has not our inexhaustible language already shown its capability of creating a German Linnæus when we read a Wilhelmi, and still more that true German in heart and speech, Oken? For the rest, the German language will, in general, never shrink up and grow impoverished, even by the greatest hospitality towards strangers. For it steadily produces (as all dictionaries show) out of its ever fresh stems a hundred times as many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren as the foreign birth it adopts in the place of children; so that after centuries the thicket that has sprung from our prolific radical words must overshadow and choke up the strange words which have shot up only as flying seed, and finally rear itself into a true banian forest, whose twigs grow down to roots, and whose upward-planted roots strike out into summits. How entangled and wild with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares! The second, but easier thing which has been done for this third, improved edition of Hesperus, of course is, that I have gone slowly through the whole Evening Star with weeder in hand, and carefully eradicated all the fungous weeds of genitives, or _Es_'s, in compound words, wherever I found them, which on the very title-page of the _Dog's_-Post-days was unfortunately the case. I had, however, much to endure in this work. Of the old actions of our over-rich language against itself, too many are attachments upon its real estate, and I was compelled, therefore, to leave many a nested crew of Es's where it had too long been settled, and appealed to witnesses and ear-witnesses for right of possession. Even up to the hour of this Preface, the author of the "_Morgen-Blatt_ letters on compound words" has been waiting, not so much for a thorough-going _examination_, (it were, perhaps, too soon for that,) but first of all for a comprehensive _reading_ of them, which, to be sure, the scattering archipelago of sheets, like islands lying apart from one another, will make difficult so long as the periodical has not yet run through its circle of numbers. But then I shall hope from the speech-investigator, when he has them complete in his house and hands before his judgment-seat, a thorough refutation or approbation.