Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Although the name of Peter Mark Roget is known to us today almost entirely as that of the creator of the Thesaurus of English Words Phrases., the man was quite remarkable in other respects, as well. Born in 1779, Roget trained as a doctor and practised medicine in London from 1808 to 1840. In 1824, he wrote The Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects, a document setting out the principle that the eye retains an image of the continuation of movement for a time after the stimulus of watching a body in motion. The significance of this thesis was not lost on resourceful inventors of the day, who at once set about developing a variety of devices that we today regard as the forerunners of the motion-picture projector: the Zoetrope, the Stroboscope, and the Praxino-scope. Roget began making notes for the system of verbal classification later employed in his Thesaurus in 1805; but it was not until after his retirement, in 1840 at age 61, that he started to work on the synonym book in earnest. The First Edition, a facsimile copy of which you are holding, was published by Longman in 1852, when Roget was 73 years of age. Subsequent editions, which were numerous, were worked on by him and, later, by his son. There is no known bibliography of all the editions of the Thesaurus, which have been published in both England and America for many years, there is no telling exactly how many have been published to date, but the number is quite large. Comparison between this First Edition and a modern edition the latest was published in June 1987 - reveals many differences: much more science and technology, which did not