It is necessary to admit that the harvest gathered is not large; but, though so scanty, it gave occasion to mature studies, and long discussions, of all of which there remains no other vestige than the brief notice recorded in the proceedings of the meetings.
It can be readily understood that, as the Dictionary invades the domains of the sciences and of philosophy, of the arts and industries, we were forced often to discuss topics so heterogeneous that the only points they had in common were the initial letters of their names. Thus, from the word Prostesis, we passed to study the word Positivismo, considered as the name of a school of philosophy. The mere exposition of this system and its definition occupied long and serious sessions. Equally long and exhaustive were the discussions of the definitions of one and another science, as that of Biology and that of Astronomy, or those fixing the acceptations of technical scientific and philosophic terms. Such discussions were often interrupted by dissertations and discourses upon points of Literature, Philology, and the History of our Literature. Some of these productions have been printed in two preceding volumes of the Memoirs.
The Academy has also undertaken to discover and bring together materials for forming the history of the national literature and an example of this activity is the article entitled Francisco Terrazas and other poets of the Sixteenth Century. Señor Don Francisco Pimentel, member de numero of this corporation has taken the lead in this and has, unaided, written that history and has begun to print it.
With the publication of the last Dictionary of the language, by the Royal Spanish Academy, the Mexican Academy considered the lexicographic work, which had been entrusted to it, as completed; not so with that which it had undertaken for forming a Diccionario de Provincialismos (Dictionary of Provincialisms), which should contain, in addition to those current throughout the Republic, those which have been limited