asserted, that for the law to be _known_, is of more importance
than to be _right_. 'Change,' says Hooker, 'is not made without
inconvenience, even from worse to better.' There is in constancy
and stability a general and lasting advantage, which will always
overbalance the slow improvements of gradual correction. Much less
ought our written language to comply with the corruptions of oral
utterance, or copy that which every variation of time or place makes
different from itself, and imitate those changes, which will again be
changed, while imitation is employed in observing them.

This recommendation of steadiness and uniformity does not proceed from
an opinion that particular combinations of letters have much influence
on human happiness; or that truth may not be successfully taught by
modes of spelling fanciful and erroneous; I am not yet so lost in
lexicography as to forget that 'words are the daughters of earth, and
that things are the sons of heaven.' Language is only the instrument
of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however,
that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might
be permanent, like the things which they denote.

In settling the orthography, I have not wholly neglected the
pronunciation, which I have directed, by printing an accent upon the
acute or elevated syllable. It will sometimes be found that the accent
is placed by the author quoted, on a different syllable from that
marked in the alphabetical series; it is then to be understood, that
custom has varied, or that the author has, in my opinion, pronounced
wrong. Short directions are sometimes given where the sound of letters
is irregular; and if they are sometimes omitted, defect in such minute
observations will be more easily excused, than superfluity.

In the investigation, both of the orthography and signification of
words, their ETYMOLOGY was necessarily to be considered, and they were
therefore to be divided into primitives and derivatives. A primitive
word is that which can be traced no further to any English root;
thus _circumspect, circumvent, circumstance, delude, concave_, and
_complicate_, though compounds in the Latin, are to us primitives.
Derivatives, are all those that can be referred to any word in English
of greater simplicity.

The derivatives I have referred to their primitives, with an accuracy
sometimes needless; for who does not see that _remoteness_ comes
from _remote_, _lovely_ f