ar have done more than teach you the meaning of
the word you began with. They have brought you some of the by-products of
the study of verbal kinships. For you no longer pass the _ologies_ by
with face averted or bow timidly ventured. You have become so well
acquainted with them that even a new one, wherever encountered, would
flash upon you the face of a friend. But now your desires are whetted. You
wish to find out how much you _can_ learn. You at last consult the
dictionary.

Here a huge obstacle confronts you. The _ologies_, like the
_ports_ (above), are a haughty clan; they are the wooed, rather
than the wooing, members of most marital households that contain them. Now
the marriage licenses recorded in the dictionary are entered under the
name of the suitor, not of the person sought. Hence you labor under a
severe handicap as you take the census of the _ologies_. Let us
imagine the handicap the most severe possible. Let us suppose that no
_ology_ had ever been the suitor. Even so, you would not be entirely
baffled. For you could look up in the dictionary the _ologies_ you
your self had been able to recall. To what profit? First, you could verify
or correct your surmise as to what the _ological_ blood betokens.
Secondly, you could perhaps obtain cross-references to yet other
_ologies_ than those you remembered.

But you are not reduced to these extremities. The _ologies_, arrogant
as they are, sometimes are the applicants for matrimony, and the marriage
registry of the dictionary so indicates. To be sure, they do not, when
thus appearing at the beginning of words, take the form _ology_. They
take the form _log_. But you must be resourceful enough to keep after
your quarry in spite of the omission of a vowel or two. Also from some
lexicons you may obtain still further help. You may find _ology, logy,
logo_, or _log_ listed as a combining form, its meaning given, and
examples of its use in compounds cited.

By your zeal and persistence you have now brought together a goodly array
of the _ologies_--all or most, let us say, of the following:
conchology, biology, morphology, phrenology, physiology, osteology,
histology, zoology, entomology, bacteriology, ornithology, pathology,
psychology, cosmology, eschatology, demonology, mythology, theology,
astrology, archeology, geology, meteorology, mineralogy, chronology,
genealogy, ethnology, anthropology, criminology, technology, doxology,
anthology, trilogy, philology, etym