If any one had asked Webster upon what part of his Dictionary he had expended the most time and now set the highest value, he would undoubtedly have answered at once the etymology, and whatever related to the history and derivation of words. The greater part of the time given continuously, from 1807 to 1826, to the elaboration of his Dictionary was spent upon this department; his severest condemnation of Johnson was upon the score of his ignorance in these particulars, and the credit which he took to himself was frank and sincere. There can be no doubt that he worked hard; there can be no doubt, either, that he had his way to make almost unaided by previous explorers. The science of comparative philology is of later birth; the English of Webster's day were no better equipped than he for the task which he undertook, except so far as they were trained by scholarship to avoid an empirical method. Horne Tooke was the man who opened Webster's eyes, and him he followed so long as he followed anybody. But Tooke was a guesser, and Webster, with all his deficiencies, had always a strong reliance upon system and method. He made guesses also, but he thought they were scientific analyses, and he came to the edge of real discoveries without knowing it. The fundamental weakness of Webster's work in etymology lay in his reliance upon external likenesses and the limitation of his knowledge to mere vocabularies. It was not an idle pedantry which made him marshal an imposing array of words from Oriental languages; he was on the right track when he sought for a common ground upon which Indo-European languages could meet, but he lacked that essential knowledge of grammatical forms, without which a knowledge of the vocabulary is liable to be misleading. His comparison of languages may be compared to the earlier labors of students in comparative anatomy who mistook merely external resemblances for structural homology. It would be idle to institute any inquiry into the agreement of the 1828 edition with the latest edition. All of Webster's original work, as he regarded it, has been swept away, and the etymology reconstructed by Dr. Mahn, of Berlin, in accordance with a science which did not exist in Webster's day. The immense labor which Webster expended remains only as a witness to that indomitable spirit which enabled him to keep steadfastly to his self-imposed task through years of isolation.