indeed is, demonstrated in the simple fact that the first edition of Webster's great work contained twelve thousand words not in Johnson; the second, thirty thousand. This statement does not, however, give a just impression of the difference between Johnson and Webster, or of the actual labor which Webster performed. The new definitions, many of which were fruits, not more of patient research than of nice discrimination, the arrangement of these definitions, so as to exhibit the history of words as it had been slowly developed, cost the author an amount of toil which can with difficulty be measured. We hazard little concerning the importance or difficulties of the work, when we quote the remark of Coleridge, that the history of a word is often more important than that of a campaign. The etymology of the language, was a subject to which he devoted much attention, and in which he made great advances. To qualify himself for tracing the derivations of English words, he studied some twenty languages, and wrote out a synopsis of the leading words of each, and incorporated the chief results of this extraordinary investigation in the very full and instructive statement of words of similar imports, which in the larger Dictionary is prefixed to English words, and which he prepared for the press also, as a separate work, of about half the size of the _American Dictionary_, entitled "_A Synopsis of Words in Twenty Languages_," which is still unpublished. In 1812, he removed to Amherst, in Massachusetts, where he devoted ten years entirely to these labors. He returned to New Haven in 1822; in the following year he received from Yale College the degree of LL. D., and in the spring of 1824 he proceeded to Paris to consult in the _Bibliothèque du Roi_ some works not accessible in this country, and then went to England and passed eight months in the libraries of the University of Cambridge. Returning to America, he made arrangements for the publication of his great work, and it finally appeared, near the end of 1826, in an edition of twenty-five hundred copies, in two quarto volumes, which were sold at twenty dollars per copy. An edition of three thousand copies was soon after printed in England.