I must conclude with the firm belief that I do not see that anything at all useful can be salvaged from Chomsky‘s version of the history of linguistics. That version is fundamentally false from beginning to end—because the scholarship is poor, because the texts have not been read, because the arguments have not been understood, because the secondary literature that might have been helpful has been left aside or unread, even when referred to. The nearly hysterical reception that has greeted Cartesian linguistics has already had its consequences. The book catalogs are bursting with announcements of series that will reprint all that pertains to ‘Cartesian linguistics’, and texts are being read as if they were Cartesian when in fact they are not. Universal grammar is profoundly important in the history of linguistics, but Chomsky‘s account fails to grasp both the nature and the history of that importance. In the meantime, other equally important aspects of the study of language in history are being ignored. A good example is Leibniz. He took the study of words, of dialects, of etymology and meanings to be worth practically all of the time he spent on the study of language (his ‘philosophical language‘ is not concerned with natural languages and is thus another subject). In the as yet unpublished ‘Epistolaris de historia etymologica dissertatio‘, he cites at least two hundred little-known works from the 16th and 17th centuries (cf. Aarsleff 1969b). These works constitute a very significant body of work pertaining to the history of the study of language. Yet, with a very few exceptions, they are totally forgotten and ignored today; they do not appear in attempts to deal with the history of linguistics, and are not listed in the reprint catalogs. Professor Chomsky has significantly set back the history of linguistics. Unless we reject his account, we will for a long while have no genuine history, but only a succesion [sic] of enthusiastic and ignorant variations on false themes.