With the universal list as his weapon, Swadesh has extended his march of conquest farther and farther into the past, eight, ten, twelve millennia back. And he has proclaimed greater or less affiliation between all Western hemisphere languages. Some of this may prove to be true, or even considerable of it, whether by genetic ramification or by diffusion and coalescence. But the farther out he moves, the thinner will be his hold on conclusive evidence, and the larger the speculative component in his inferences. He has traversed provinces and kingdoms, but he has not consolidated them behind him, nor does he control them. He has announced results on Hokan, Penutian, Uto-Aztecan, and almost all other American families and phyla, and has diagrammed their degree of interrelation; but he has not worked out by lexicostatistics one comprehensively complete classification of even a single family other than Salish. That is his privilege. The remote, cloudy, possible has values of its own -- values of scope, stimulus, potential, and imagination. But there is also a firm aspect to lexicostatistics: the aspect of learning the internal organization of obvious natural genetic groups of languages as well as their more remote and elusive external links; of classification first, with elapsed age merely a by-product; of acquiring evidential knowledge of what happened in Athabascan, in Yokuts, in Uto-Aztecan in the last few thousand years as well as forecasting what more anciently may have happened between them. This involves step-by-step progress, and such will have to be the day-by-day work of lexicostatistics as a growing body of scientific inquiry. If of the founders of glottochronology Swadesh has escaped our steady plodding, and Lees has repudiated his own share in the founding, that is no reason why we should swerve.