Nothing is found in the realms of speech any more than in those of nature," without father or mother." Here, as everywhere else, the maxim is true, "ex nihilo nihil fit." The languages, therefore, of the world, like the men who have spoken them, have all been bound together by a regular series of sequences, running link by link in luminous beauty, from any and every language now spoken upon earth, to the first language, in which listening angels heard Adam and Eve discourse to each other; and from that back to God himself, the great All-in-all, from whose own girdle the golden chain of human speech divine was dropped lovingly down to man, in order to bind him to himself, and all nations in heavenly sympathy with each other.

As for the Latin, whose connection with the Greek and Sanscrit has thus suggested and required the further and wider statement of the connection of all languages with each other, it has excellences and advantages of its own, which, while they set the seal of its peculiar individuality upon it, demonstrate its capability to supply the varied wants of human speech, to be broad and deep. It will be the quick, decided testimony of any one who has studied it for many years, having surveyed its dimensions on every side, having sounded all its depths and scaled all its heights, and scanned its inward treasures and its outward relations, that, in respect to the history of its influence as much as to that of its origin, and in respect to its own iron-like stability and the stability, force and dignity which it has imparted to the different languages into whose bosom it has poured the current of its own living strength, it is full of wonders. Not only is no one study in the whole current of educational appliances, equal to it, for all the purposes of mental and scholastic drill; but also, as a matter of actual fact, ninetenths of all the linguistic culture and of all the many rich results of the higher classical education of the whole civilized

to trace the different aspects and characteristics of the Jews, in different parts of the world, and even of Hindûstan alone, although everywhere living, in vaunted seclusion of blood from other people, as to their figure, countenance, color, and whole physique.

world, have been obtained from this source, in all ages. The Latin is thus distinctly dwelt upon at the outset and at length, because its position in the science of etymology is very high and altogether peculiar. And it is one of the first duties as well as one of the first instincts of an amateur of classical or vernacular etymology, to vindicate the Latin from the false ideas and estimates that prevail without thought concerning it, in the community. The Latin is central in its position and bearings, between the first known languages and those now existing. In it they find their mutual bond of connection. Around the Latin, as their common interpreter, all the ancient and modern languages of the civilized world stand waiting with reverent looks and mutual obeisance. No language upon earth has in it so much of what is old at the same time with so much of what is new. But for the Latin and the Greek, the Sanscrit, that wonderful fossil language in whose extinct remains we find the types of all the subsequent Indo-European languages, would be well nigh devoid of interest to us; and but for the Latin, the modern languages would, all, at least but the Gothic branch, and that much more largely than most suppose, be tangled etymologically in a web of inextricable confusion. As on Acro-Corinthus the classical scholar might stand, and look down with swimming eyes upon the Saronic gulf to the eastward, where Athens still glitters in her beauty, and upon the Corinthian gulf to the westward, and see beyond its waters, Parnassus, sacred to the Muses, with its snow-white crown, having the fountain of Castalia in its bosom and the oracle of Delphi at its feet: so, standing on the heights of the Latin language, as on a tall isthmus rising between two oceans, the past and the present, we can look before us and see the waves of the elder ages, as they bear on their bosom the wonders of India, Persia, and Greece, roll and break at our feet; or, turn and behold behind us the vast expanse of the future, covered with the riches of all nations, retiring in the far-off horizon from the view, until sky and sea, mingling together, conceal it in their own indistinguishable confusion. Here is the high, true position for a complete

survey of the facts of comparative etymology. From it, with a clear glass, the indistinct and mysterious forms of words are resolved, in every direction, into well-defined elements of vision; and, as mountain ranges are precipitous on one side, while on the other, like weary camels, they couch down gradually into the vales below, so the farther side of the Latin, its archaic Sanscrit side, presents a bold, sharp outline, from its summit to its base; while its hither Romanic side subsides, in every variety of slope and sweep and angle and curve, so gently, into the modern languages of our times, that it is almost hard to say where it ceases to be Latin, and where it begins to be something else.

But in no language is the area of etymological research so wide, and covered with such untold riches as in our own language. He who would gather up the treasures of English etymology must make his garners large, for the harvest spreads over many fields and many centuries. Not only our own indigenous growths are in it, but exotics also from every clime and every age, in measureless abundance. As in no nation there has been such a commingling of all affinities of blood, so also in no language has there been such a mixture of all etymologies, as in the English; and, as under the power of ancient Rome, all nations soon became woven into one common web with her, of fortune and of fate, so, under the absorbing and assimilating energies of the English mind and tongue, the wealth of thought and of speech contributed by all nations, has been incorporated into the greatness of our mother tongue. The sentiments, experiences and utterances of every age and of every zone, belonging to the whole wide circumference of the earth, and to the whole mountain range of human development, from the lowest to the highest point, are in it, and in the very forms in which, at the time, they burst spontaneously into view. Into the English, as into the bosom of a great central sea, all the streams of the past and present have poured and are still pouring their varied contents.

Every language," says Richter, "is a dictionary of faded metaphors." Our languages, in their present state, as

known to the inner consciousness of those who use them, are but herbariums, in which lie pressed and preserved, but unappreciated, the dry forms of words that once were green with life and beauty, and, as now handled, are but the relics of their former selves. As used by the ancients, to whom they were vernacular, the dead languages, as with very ironical propriety they are often called by those who thus speak of them, since in all their inner beauties as well as in all their outward scientific relations, they are so opaque and dead to them, were full, in whatever light they saw them, of ever changing, opaline brilliancy. Apples of gold in pictures of silver" were those dear old "words fitly spoken," to their interior sense; yea, rather, gems which had been dropped from a mother's hand into theirs, and which seemed in their very brightness to reflect forever that mother's smile. And to the student now, who comprehends the power of words, to whom they are transparent, revealing all their inmost essence to his lingering gaze, their lost light returns again, and language is evermore living and lovely. Each lettered page is to him a mass of shining wonders, a tree of Eden, loaded with blossoms clustering upon blossoms, on boughs bending and waving with the precious weight. Language is to him one vast redundant flora, full of the glitter of leaves, the scent of flowers, and the lusciousness of celestial fruitage.

Each language, but most of all, for our benefit, our own language and those great languages, the Greek and Latin, with which it is so intimately connected, need to be elaborated, and to have all their inward treasures brought forth into clear view, in order that language, as such, the greatest of all the arts of life, may be truly comprehended by each succeeding generation of educated, men, and employed by them, according to all its deep, real capabilities, in the divine contact of mind with mind, and the still diviner labor of mind for mind. As the body is the temple of the soul, and should be full, as it is, of strange adaptations to the wonderful sensibilities and energies of its immortal inhabitant, so language is the temple of thought and love, the only exercises that ally earth to heaven, and man to God, and is full

of all beauteous adaptations and uses which deserve to be searched and seen, as the divinely constructed organ of communication between finite minds on the one hand, and also between mankind and the God that made them, on the other.

II. The history of classical and vernacular etymology.

This, fully rendered, would involve a complete history of classical and comparative philology. But, as the details of such a history have a special character of their own, and are reserved for a succeeding Article, it will be sufficient here to sketch its general philosophical outline. There have been three different stages in its development:

1. That of its popular empirical treatment. 2. That of its literary empirical treatment.

3. That of its true scientific treatment, under the exact laws of modern philology.

The etymological instinct is very common, in all nations, among the thinking classes. It is as natural and pleasant for those who reason at all, to think about the origin and connection of words, as about relation and dependence, antecedents and consequents, cause and effect, in any other direction. There is full scope here for the play of all those faculties that demand adventure and enjoy invention. The ancients were much addicted to this popular, random style of etymologizing, as is manifest in much of their mythology; their early traditionary history, and their poetical legends.

1 Thus, the story of the she-wolf, suckling Romulus and Remus, from the name of the nurse Lupa; that of the low origin of Servius Tullius, from the resemblance of Servius to Servus; that of Brutus (brutus, stupid), reserving himself under a mask of pretended idiocy, for the crisis that was to come; that of Mutius Scaevola (from scaevus, left-handed), calmly burning off his right hand before Porsena, and other stories like them, originated in such a way. So, also, the conception of the one-eyed Cyclops, hideous and huge (from Kúκλw, in a circle, and , the eye), was born in the brain of some ancient etymologist, as was that of the Harpies (fem. pl. of åpπvios, and meaning lit. the seizers), a name used originally to describe violent winds, blowing off the coast of the Ionian Sea, as their names also show, viz. Podarge (swift-footed), Aello (whirler) and Ocypete (flying rapidly), daughters of Thaumas (wonder) and Electra (the lightning). So also the details of the Greek theogony were of the same source, as of Uranus, Ge, Chronus, the Titans, the Cyclops, etc.