Wilkins's ‘Tables’ and Roget's ‘Thesaurus’: An Investigation into Traditions of Onomasiology

ly defined semantic compartments? For most of the chapters, though not for all, it is marked by its semantic concreteness, by the visual, palpable, audible, the easily imaginable character of word meanings. For Wilkins, reality indeed seems to consist of things with their own characters and shapes, and also with their natural use. No proof is needed for the entries under substance (genera VII to XX). The word-lists here swarm with names (in Wilkins's sense) of the objects of nature. His lament that he is unable to enumerate them exhaustively shows in itself that this was actually his aim. Even the headings of the genera and species, i.e. abstract terms, are introduced with quite concrete features. Elements, for example, are 'the great Masses of natural Bodies, which are of a more simple Fabric than the rest' (p. 56); fire is 'the hottest and lightest' element (p. 57); air is known 'for its Levity and Warmth' (p. 58); and water for 'its Gravity and Moisture' (p. 58); fmally 'the Coldest, Thickest, Heaviest, of any of those Bodies counted Elements, is called Earth' (p. 59). The, essentially, descriptive taxonomy of biology at Wilkins's time supported his method. In this way, the whole taxonomy of minerals, stones, plants, and animals, including their exterior and interior parts, is rendered. The entries under quantity (genera XXI to XXIII), divided into 'magnitude' and 'measure' also contain lexemes with concrete meanings, because they denote the simpie and complex figures of geometry, the numbers of algebra, the units of value (money), of quantity and duration. Only the chapter 'Of Space' between them (genus XXII) is different in that it does not enumerate imaginable chunks of reality but ideas (see below). With the Tables under quality (genera XXIV to XXVIII) the picture is slightly different. Lexemes denoting the powers of the soul (e.g. understanding, judgement) and the body (e.g. the senses), habits (e.g. emotions, virtues), manners (e.g. candour, patience), and sensible qualities (e.g. sweetness, fattiness) indicate ideas rather than things or actions, mostly expressed by nouns derived from adjectives (like equity, vigilance, peaceableness, condescension, submission). But there then, again, follow entries with names of diseases (genus XXVIII) which denote fairly concrete phenomena and states (e.g. ulcer, wart).