General Parmentier (Vocabulaire arabe-francais des Principaux Termes de Geographie, etc.:  Paris, rue Antoine-Dubois, 1882); and, to mention no others, the Grammaire Arabe Vulgaire (Paris, 1824) of M. Caussin de Perceval (fils) has extended far and wide.  Berggren (Upsal, 1844) published his Guide Francais-Arabe des Voyageurs en Syrie et en Egypte.  Rowland de Bussy printed (Algiers, 1877) his Dialogues Francais-Arabes in the Algerian dialect.  Fr. Jose de Lerchundi, a respected Missioner to Tangier, has imitated and even improved upon this in his Rudimentos del Arabe Vulgar (Madrid, Rivadeneyra, 1872); and his studies of the Maghrabi dialect are most valuable.  Dr. A. Socin produced his Arabische Sprichworter, etc. (Tubingen, 1878), and the late Wilhelm Spitta-Bey, whose early death was so deeply lamented left a grammar of Egyptian which would have been a model had the author brought to his task more knowledge of Coptic in his Grammatik des Arabischen vulgar Dialektes von AEgypten, (Leipsig, 1870).  Dr. Landberg published with Brill of Leyden and Maisonneuve of Paris, 1883, a volume of Syrian Proverbs and promises some five others—­No. 2, Damascus and the Hauran; No. 3, Kasrawan and the Nusayriyah; No. 4, Homs, Hamah and Halab (Aleppo), and No. 5, the Badawin of Syria.  It is evident that the process might be prolonged ad infinitum by a writer of whom I shall have something to say presently.  M. Clement Huart (Jour.  Asiat., Jan. ’83) has printed notes on the dialect of Damascus:  Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje published a collection of 77 proverbs and idioms with lengthy notes in his Mehkanische Sprichworter, etc.  (Haag, Martinus Nijhoff, 1886), after being expelled from Meccah by the Turkish authorities who had discovered him only through a Parisian journal Le Temps (see his Het Mekkanshe Feest, Leyden, 1880).  For the lower Najd and upper Hijaz we have the glossary of Arabic words ably edited by Prof.  M. J. de Goeje in Mr. Charles M. Doughty’s valuable and fantastic “Arabia Deserta” (ii. 542-690:  see The Academy, July 28th, ’88).  Thus the local vocabularies are growing, but it will be long before the ground is covered.

Again the East, and notably the Moslem East since the Massacre of Damascus in 1860, although still moving slowly, shows a distinct advance.  The once secluded and self- contained communities are now shaken by the repeated and continuous shocks of progress around them; and new wants and strange objects compel them nilly-willy to provide vernacular equivalents for the nomenclature of modern arts and sciences.  Thus the Orientalist, who would produce a contemporary lexicon of Persian, must not only read up all the diaries and journals of Teheran and the vocabularies of Yezd and Herat, he must go further a-field.  He should make himself familiar with the speech of the Iliyat or wandering pastoral tribes and master a host of cognate tongues whose chiefs are Armenian (Old and New), Caucasian, a modern Babel, Kurdish, Luri (Bakhtiyari),