We have only a word to say as to the _illustrations_, as they are
called, a mistaken profuseness in which disfigures both Dictionaries,
another evil result of bookselling competition. The greater part of
them, especially those in Webster, are fitter for a child's scrap-book
than for a volume intended to go into a student's library. Such
adjuncts seem to us allowable only, if at all, somewhat as they were
introduced by Blunt in his "Glossographia," to make terms of heraldry
more easily comprehensible. They might be admitted to save trouble in
describing geometrical figures, or in explaining certain of the more
frequently occurring terms in architecture and mechanics, but beyond
this they are childish. The publishers of Webster give us all the
coats-of-arms of the States of the American Union, among other equally
impertinent woodcuts. We enter a protest against the whole thing, as an
equally unfair imputation on the taste and the standard of judgment of
intelligent Americans. If we must have illustrations, let them be strictly
so, and not primer-pictures. Both Dictionaries give us the figure of a
crossbow, for instance, as if there could be anywhere a boy of ten years
old who did not know the implement, at least under its other name of
_bow-gun_.
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