It's the next funniest thing to grubbing after stumps in a
ten-acre lot. Dentists make capital philologists--: they are so much
accustomed to digging for roots. It's rather dull work to shovel around
in the Anglo-Saxon stratum, but, as soon as you strike the Sanscrit,
then you're off, and if you don't find big nuggets, it's because--well,
it's because there are none there. Sometimes you dig down to about the
time when NOAH went on his little sailing excursion, and strike what
seems to be a first-class sockdolager of root, but what is the use?
Unfortunately the philology business is overdone; it's chock full of
first-class broken down pedagogues and unsuccessful ink-slingers, and,
as soon as you offer a curious specimen in the way of roots, they write
a book to prove that the root don't exist, or, if it does, that it
should not.
However, there is an advantage in knowing the roots of words, and the
use to which they were put in former years. Everybody, you know, is very
anxious to read CHAUCER and SPENSER. Now, after you have studied this
subject about forty-two years, you will be able to read CHAUCER with the
aid of an old English dictionary and an Anglo-Saxon grammar.
Many so-called philologists, who have preceded me, have ignorantly
derived words from improper sources.
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