sense than any of the others the growth of language, and ought to bring most distinctly to light the forces actually concerned in that growth.

The general object attained by additions to language is obviously the extension and the improvement of expression, supply of representative signs for new knowledge, amendment in the representation of old knowledge. But, as we must first observe, these ends are to no small extent gained without any apparent change in language. In part, by new syntactical combinations of the old materials of speech, by putting together old. words into new sentences: and this is plainly a department of the use of language by which great results are won; hosts of new cognitions and deductions are thus provided for. And yet, this work cannot go on without more or less affecting the inner content of the terms we use, changing the limits and even the whole character of the conceptions which they represent. If, for example, we say "the sun rises, shedding light and heat on the earth," the sentence is one which (or its equivalent in other languages) might have been uttered, so far as concerns the items of which it is made up, at any time since the infancy of speech and knowledge: but how different the real meaning which it stands for as employed by us, and by a modern boor or an ancient sage! Rise to us, as applied to the sun, is only a concession to appearances; we do not care to take the trouble to say that the earth has been rolling over till now our spot of it comes within reach of the sun's rays; and as to rising and falling, it is only since Newton discovered the great cosmic law of gravitation that we really know what the words denote. It is a much shorter time since we learned that light and heat are modes of motion of matter, apprehended by certain effects which they pro

duce on our sensitive organization. And the transformation which sun and earth have undergone in our minds needs no more than an allusion. The example is, no doubt, an extreme one; yet it is a perfectly fair, even normal, illustration of what becomes in speech of one most important part of the new knowledge we acquire. This kind of change is ever operating like a ferment through the whole material of language, incorporating without outward show the changed apprehensions, the clearer cognitions, the sharpened distinctions, which are the result of gradual intellectual growth. It is, as we have called it before, the mind of the community all the time at work beneath the framework of its old language, improving its instruments of expression by adapting them to new uses.

In fact, all the ground over which we went in the fifth chapter, treating the alterations of meaning as individual changes, of various kind and direction, we might properly enough here go over again, having in view the purposes which the changes are made to subserve. That, however, would take too much time; and we must content ourselves with briefly pointing out certain aspects of the subject.

How great, in the first place, is the sum of enrichment of language by this means, may be seen by observing the variety of meanings belonging to our words. If each of them were like a scientific term, limited to a definite class of strictly similar things, the number which the cultivated speaker now uses would be very far from answering his purposes. But it is the customary office of a word to cover, not a point, but a territory, and a territory that is irregular, heterogeneous, and variable. A certain noted English lexicographer thought he had performed a great feat when he

had reduced the uses of good to forty varieties, besides an insoluble residue of a dozen or two of phrases; and, though we need not accept all his distinctions as valuable, their number at any rate indicates a real condition of things. No student who remembers his occasional despair as (in early stages of his studies) he has glanced over the lists of meanings of Greek and Latin words in his dictionaries, trying to find the one that fitted the case in hand, will question that foreign words, at any rate, have a perplexing variety of signification; but the case is precisely the same with the foreigner who uses an English dictionary. It is the duty of the competent lexicographer, in any language, to reduce the apparent confusion to order by discovering the nucleus, the natural etymological meaning from which all the rest have come by change and transfer, and by drawing out the others in proper relation to their original and to one another, so as to suggest the tie of association by which each was added to the rest-if he do not find (as is not very rarely the fact) that the tie is doubtful or undiscoverable. If we were to count in our words only those degrees of difference of meaning for which in other cases separate provision of expression is made, the 100,000 English words would doubtless be found equivalent to a million or two. As an extreme example of what this mode of enrichment can do, there is in existence one highly cultivated tongue, the Chinese, all the growth of which has had to be by differentiation of meaning, since it rejects all external additions; and it has only about 1,500 words: what a host of discordant and hardly connectable meanings each word is compelled to bear may be easily imagined.

The particular mode of transfer by which new expression is most abundantly won is the figurative (as set

forth and illustrated in the last chapter but one). But, rich as are its contributions to the absolute needs of ex pression, especially in the department of intellectual and relational language, they are by no means limited to that. The mind not only has a wonderful facility in catching resemblances and turning them to account, but it takes a real creative pleasure in the exercise, and derives from it desirable variety and liveliness of style. The power is strikingly illustrated in the case of men whose life-occupations run in restricted lines, and who have little general culture; when they come to talk upon matters less familiar, they see constant analogies between these and their staple subjects of thought, and their discourse is redolent of the "shop." So especially the sailor talks as if all the world were a ship, and with a piquancy and raciness which, as illustrated in the nautical stories, is full of charm to us land-lubbers; and many a term or phrase of this origin has passed into our general English tongue. And if we would see how far the phraseology of the mine and the card-table can be made to go in figurative substitution for ordinary speech, we may read, in Mark Twain's "Roughing It" (chap. xlvii.), that amusing (and, in this aspect, instructive) account of the interview between the preacher and the gambler who wants to get his late exemplary partner decently buried. For a more dignified example, take the constant recurrence of the Vedic poets to the cattle-yard and the pasture for the staple of their comparisons, and for the suggestion of many a term used later, without any sense of a figure involved in it, to express human conditions. So far as this is odd or undignified, it forms the largest element of what we call slang," and we frown upon it; and properly enough; but yet it is only the excess and abuse of a tendency

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which is wholly legitimate, and of the highest value, in the history of speech. It seeks relief from the often oppressive conventionality, even insipidity, of words worn out by the use of persons who have put neither knowledge nor feeling into them, and which seem incapable of expressing anything that is real. In the exuberance of mental activity, and the natural delight of language-making, slang is a necessary evil; and there are grades and uses of slang whose charm no one need be ashamed to feel and confess; it is like reading a narrative in a series of rude but telling pictures, instead of in words.

A meaningless conventionality, to be sure, has also its special uses, as in the forms of social intercourse, where we are sometimes called upon to disguise instead of disclosing our thoughts by speech. To take an example or two of the simplest kind-we say "how do you do?" to an acquaintance, but should feel imposed upon if he answered by detailing all the symptoms of his health; we begin a letter to one whom we really detest with "my dear sir,” and at the end declare ourselves his "obedient servant," though we should resent a single word from him which bore the semblance of a command. And so in many other cases: to devise more sincere phrases would seem blunt and odd, an unbecoming intrusion of our personality. Then, again, there are subjects of decency or delicacy, with reference to which we have to pick our expressions very carefully, if we would not offend or disgust. It is one of the most striking illustrations possible of the dominion which words have won over our thoughts, that we will tolerate in indirect, figurative, merely suggestive expression what would be repulsive in direct statement. Here, by an effect contrary to that which we noticed above, a term perhaps