Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/732

 straight. The remarkable feature in this jaw is the series of premolar and molar teeth. These were very numerous, apparently as many as twelve in all, possibly more. In comparing this fossil with the forms already known, it is seen to differ widely from any living type. Its nearest affinities are with the genus Stylodon of Owen, and in many respects the correspondence is close.

In the "American Journal of Science," for September, Professor Marsh describes two lower jaws belonging to animals apparently of the same genus (Dryolestes) as the first American Jurassic mammal; these remains came from the same locality and horizon as the preceding. These new specimens furnish important characters to distinguish the genus. In one of them the angle of the lower jaw is strongly inflected, thus indicating its marsupial nature. The other proves that the genus is quite distinct from Didelphys, as there were at least four premolars. This specimen differs from the jaws of Dryolestes priscus (the first Jurassic mammal found in this country) in being more slender, less curved, and less compressed. Professor Marsh gave to the species the name Dryolestes vorax. The animal appears to have been smaller than D. priscus.

Classification of Words by Ideas.—At the recent Philological Convention at Newport, Mr. Stephen Pearl Andrews read an interesting paper proposing some further development of views previously suggested regarding the classification of terms by the ideas they represent, and he showed that the process already begun is capable of being carried to a far greater degree of simplification than has yet been reached. Mr. Andrews's paper was to the effect that there are two possible ways of pursuing the study of words, one of which only has heretofore been brought into use, and the adoption of the other one of which will constitute a new method and a new era in philology. These two ways are—1. To study the word, as a bundle of sounds, the body of the word first, and in the main, and the idea or meaning of the word in a secondary and incidental manner merely; and, 2. To study the idea embodied in the word, as the main thing, making the phonetic structure of the word secondary and accessory to the word. The first of these methods Mr. Andrews calls historical or physical, and the second ideological or psychical. The historical method is the current and triumphant method, initiated by Jacob Grimm, and now completed, in a sense, by August Fick, in the supplement to his dictionary of the Indo-Germanic language, where he sums up the root-words as a mere handful (50 to 500), from which all the words (virtually) ever spoken in southern and western Asia, and in Europe, are derived. This historical method Mr. Andrews also calls, therefore, the German method, and he thinks it has now achieved nearly all that it is able to do.

The ideological method has hardly yet been begun, and remains now to be elaborated. It was, however, unconsciously initiated by Noah Webster, in the introduction to his dictionary, while he was working for a quite different purpose, and may therefore be called, for easy distinction, the American method. As Fick reduces all the words we use to a mere handful, so Webster, on the other hand, reduces the meanings of all these words to a group of thirty-four leading ideas, a less number than that of Fick's root-words. Both the German and the American method are, therefore, traveling on the road to lingual unification, or, what is the same thing, to the reduction of language to an ultimate simplification. On the side of ideas this is the same as what the metaphysicians have sought to do, working abstractly, with their categories.

At this point, Mr. Andrews himself takes up the subject, on the side of ideas, or the American method, and pushes the simplification down to its utmost. He analyzes and further generalizes Webster's thirty-four classes of ideas, reducing them all to three grand major classes: 1. The idea of division or apartness (of, off, fromness); 2. The idea of unity or togetherness (at, to, with); and 3. The idea of vacillation between those two. These three ideas Mr. Andrews identifies with the differentiation and integration of Herbert Spencer, and with the coaction or interrelationship between those two ideas.