[15] In some cases, long Lists of the Authors, from whose works ’the illustrative quotations have been selected,’ are given, without the statement that many of those quotations have not actually been selected from the authors and works named, but have merely been annexed from Johnson or one of his supplementers.

[16] The famous Deutsches Woerterbuch of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, after many years of preparation, began to be printed in 1852; Jacob Grimm himself died in 1863, in the middle of the letter F; the work is expected to reach the end of S by the close of the century.  The great Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal was commenced in 1852; its first volume, A—­Ajuin, was published in 1882, and it is not yet quite half-finished.  Of the new edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca, which is to a certain extent on historical principles, Vol.  I, containing A, was published in 1863, and Vol.  VIII, completing I, in 1899; at least twenty-five more years will be required to reach Z. None of these works embraces so long a period of the language, or is so strictly historical in method, as the New English Dictionary.  Rather are they, like Littre’s great Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise, Dictionaries of the modern language, with the current words more or less historically treated.