G LAN CI N G through the vocabularies which appear in almost every modern foreign language reading-text, the practical-minded person cannot help but wonder if there is not a great deal of useless repetition in the various books which the student of a modern foreign language must purchase. Even a superficial comparison of the vocabularies of three or four texts will justify this suspicion. Under the letter "W" in the vocabulary of Germelshausen, for example, the writer selected from less than two columns (wachsen to wenn) twenty of the words which he felt were quite common, and found that sixteen of the same twenty words appear in Immensee, sixteen in L'Arrabbiata, sixteen in Minna von Barnhelm, and eighteen in Hermann und Dorothea.It is a well-known fact that vocabularies are expensive. Hence it is unfortunate that they frequently extend over nearly as many pages as the reading material; even the favorites, which are read partly because of their small vocabularies, 1mmensee, Germelshausen, and L'Arrabbiata, show this to be true. These three stories in editions chosen at random! have a total of 107 pages of reading-matter and 97 pages of vocabulary.Although the recent depression has played its share in making students and teachers alike expense-conscious and has directed the attention of the latter to the repetition in vocabularies, it is really an old problem. Editors of textbooks have many times purposely omitted those vocables which they felt the student should know before reading the text in question.

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