Original work, patient induction of facts, minute verification of evidence, are slow processes, and a work so characterized cannot be put together with scissors and paste, or run off with the speed of the copyist. All the great dictionaries of the modern languages have taken a long time to make; but the speed with which the New English Dictionary has now advanced nearly to its half-way point can advantageously claim comparison with the progress of any other great dictionary, even when this falls far behind in historical and inductive character.[16] Be the speed what it may, however, there is the consideration that the work thus done is done once for all; the structure now reared will have to be added to, continued, and extended with time, but it will remain, it is believed, the great body of fact on which all future work will be built. It is never possible to forecast the needs and notions of those who shall come after us; but with our present knowledge it is not easy to conceive what new feature can now be added to English Lexicography. At any rate, it can be maintained that in the Oxford Dictionary, permeated as it is through and through with the scientific method of the century, Lexicography has for the present reached its supreme development. In the course of this lecture, it has been needful to give so many details as to individual works, that my audience may at times have failed 'to see the wood for the trees,' and may have lost the clue of the lexicographical evolution. Let me then in conclusion recapitulate the stages which have been already indicated. These are: the glossing of difficult words in Latin manuscripts by easier Latin, and at length by English words; the collection of the English glosses into Glossaries, and the elaboration of Latin-English Vocabularies; the later formation of English-Latin Vocabularies; the production of Dictionaries of English and another modern language; the compilation of Glossaries and Dictionaries of 'hard' English words; the extension of these by Bailey, for etymological purposes, to include words in general; the idea of a Standard Dictionary, and its realization by Dr. Johnson with illustrative quotations; the notion that a Dictionary should also show the pronunciation of the living word; the extension of the function of quotations by Richardson; the idea that the Dictionary should be a biography of every word, and should set forth every fact connected with its origin, history, and use, on a strictly historical method. These stages coincide necessarily with stages of our national and literary history; the first two were already reached before the Norman Conquest; the third followed upon the recognition of English as the official language of the nation, and its employment by illustrious Middle English writers. The Dictionaries of the modern languages were necessitated first by the fact that French had at length ceased to be the living tongue of any class of Englishmen, and