Anyone seeking authoritative information on the subject of prefixation in French will be faced with a difficult problem; a thorough examination of the linguistic bibliographies will reveal no work of a general nature on prefixation and, indeed, very few studies of individual prefixes. This is all the more lamentable in view of the fact that the relevant sections of the bibliographies contain numerous titles of studies on suffixation from many aspects. In fact, the prefix, as a means of creating new words in French, has been sadly neglected as a subject for stud;y by comparison with the suffix. R.-L. Wagner appears to be very well aware of this not unimportant lacuna, and, since detailed studies of each individual prefix are necessary before any satisfactory work on prefixation as a whole can be undertaken, he has done much to fill the gap, both by working on the subject of prefixation himself and by encouraging others to make a stud;y of the functions of a number of individual prefixes in French. De(s)- has not yet received attention