PREFACE.
The main argument of the following work was first drawn out in the form of six lectures "On the Principles of Linguistic Science," delivered at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, during the month of March, 1864. Of these, a brief abstract was printed in the Annual Report of the Institution published in the same year.[1] In the following winter (December, 1864, and January, 1865) they were again delivered as one of the regular courses before the Lowell Institute, in Boston, having been expanded into a series of twelve lectures. They are now laid before a wider public, essentially in their form as there presented. But they have been in the mean time carefully rewritten, and have suffered a not inconsiderable further expansion, as the removal of the enforced Procrustean limit, of sixty minutes to a lecture, has given opportunity to discuss with greater fulness important points in the general argument which had before come off with insufficient treatment. The chief matter of theory upon which my opinion has undergone any noteworthy modification is the part to be attributed to the onomatopoetic principle in the first steps of language-making (see the eleventh lecture). To this principle, at each revision
- ↑ Report for 1863, pp. 95—116.
