Note 1 — INTRODUCTION.

A thousand words have thus been traced through the sister languages of Aryan birth—a number certainly adequate to the wants of primitive man, when we remember that of more than 120,000 words which constitute our present vocabulary but 3,000 are in common use. The Old Testament was translated with the help of only 5,642 English words. While Shakespeare’s genius required 21,000 words for its expression, Milton’s epic employs less than half that number.