suggest to the botanist their characteristic forms. Where the particular form is common to two or three, the names of all are grouped in one compound, and the whole word terminated with the Greek syllable -oid, expressive of likeness.

The nomenclature of science is often so repugnant to the ear, and so refractory to the tongue of our Anglican race, that it never finds admission into the dialect of common life, but as the principles of abstract reasoning, and the facts of natural knowledge become more widely diffused, much of the vocabulary which belonged originally to the schools, escapes from its learned seclusion, and, generally with more or less modification of meaning, finally incorporates itself into the common language, the familiar speech of the people. At present the predominance of scientific pursuits is bestowing upon English a great number of words borrowed from the nomenclature, both of the various branches of natural history, and of the more exact sciences of pure and mixed mathematics. Thus, conditions, in the sense of the circumstances under which a given phenomenon takes place, and which may be supposed to modify its character, problem, corollary, phenomenon, quantitative and qualitative, demonstrative, positive and negative, the mean between extremes, antipodal, zenith, inverse ratio, and hundreds of other terms lately introduced for the special purposes of science, and denoting new, or at least unfamiliar things and relations of things, have now become a part of the general vocabulary of all educated persons.*

* Exorbitant, the Latin conjugate verb to which, exorbito, acquired a popular figurative sense even in the classic age of Rome, was originally a term of art applied to those heavenly bodies whose path deviated much from the plane of the orbits of the planets most familiar to ancient astronomy. It has now lost its technical meaning altogether, and his no longer a place in the dia lect of science.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the questions which absorbed the thoughts of men, and shook the dynasties of Europe, were not those immediately affecting material interests, but those concerning the relations of man to his Maker, and of the subject to his rulers. Theology and civil polity, and, as a necessary preparation for the comprehension of both, metaphysical studies, were the almost exclusive pursuit of the great thinkers, the active intellects of that long period. The facts, the arguments, the authorities which bore upon these questions, were principally to be sought for in the ancient languages, and when the reasoning was to be employed to influence the unlearned, to be clothed in an English dress, and to be popularized, so to speak, it was at once discovered that the existing language was destitute of appropriate words to convey ideas so new to the English mind. The power of forming new words from indigenous roots by composition and derivation, retained by the cognate languages, had been lost or suspended in English, and, moreover, the Saxon primitives specially adapted for employment in this way, had been superseded by French words imported by the Norman nobility, or by a sectarian Latin phraseology introduced by the Romish ecclesiastics. Hence new vocables, and those almost uniformly of Greek or Latin etymology, were coined for use in theological and political discussion, and many of them soon became a constituent part of the general medium of thought. In fact, a complete English metaphysical nomenclature was formed, and freely and familiarly used, by the great thinkers who lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the materialistic age which followed, such portion of this vocabulary as was not already incorporated into the universal patrimony of the language,

had become obsolete, and when, fifty years ago, Coleridge attempted to revive the forgotten study of metaphysics, he found that the current dialect of the day afforded no terms for the adequate expression of logical and philosophical categories. But a recurrence to the religious philosophy of a more intellectual age showed that the English metaphysicians of that period had in great part anticipated a nomenclature, which has been supposed to be the invention of German speculators and their followers. Reason and understanding, as words denominative of distinct faculties, the adjectives sensuous, transcendental, subjective and objective, supernatural, as an appellation of the spiritual, or that immaterial essence which is not subject to the law of cause and effect, and is thus distinguished from that which is natural, are all words revived, not invented by the school of Coleridge.*

In the mean time, and down to the present day, the rapid progress of physical science and industrial art has given birth to a great multitude of technical terms, a large part of which, in more or less appropriate applications, or in figurative senses, has entered into the speech of every-day life. Thus the means of articulate and written communication

* The following extract from Sir Kenelm Digby's Observations on Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici is, both in manner and in matter, worthy of some much later metaphysicians.

"If God should join the Soul of a lately dead man, (even whilest his dead corps should lie entire in his winding sheet here,) unto a body made of earth taken from some mountain in America, it were most true and certain that the body he then should live by, were the same identical body he lived with before his death and late resurrection. It is evident that sameness, thisness, and that ness, belongeth not to matter by itself, (for a general indifference runneth through it all;) but only as it is distinguished and individuated by the form, which in our case whensoever the soul doth, it must be understood always to be the same matter and body."

upon more familiar as well as more recondite subjects have been vastly extended, even since the period when Shakespeare showed, by an experimental test, that English was already capable of exhibiting almost every conceivable phase of internal and external being in our common humanity.

The permanent literature of a given period is not a true index of the general vocabulary of the period, for the exemption of a great work from the fleeting interests and passions, that inspire the words of its own time, is one of the very circumstances that insure its permanence. That which is to live for ever must appeal to more catholic and lasting sympathies than those immediately belonging to the special concerns of any era, however pregnant it may be with great consequences to the weal or the woe of man.

The dialects of the field, the market, and the fireside in former ages have left but an imperfect record behind them, and they are generally to be traced only in the scanty pages of the comic dramatist, and in the few fragments of private correspondence that antiquarian curiosity has rescued from destruction. But, for a century, the historical novel, and the periodical press, in its various forms of newspaper, solid review and light magazine, have embodied the mutable speech of the hour, in its widest range of vocabulary, phraseological expression, and proverb. While, therefore, we do not possess satisfactory means of testing the humors, the aims, the morals, of our remoter ancestors by the character of their familiar speech, we have, in the lighter literature of later years, ample means of detecting the unconscious expression of the mental and moral tendencies, which have marked the age of our fathers and our own.

LECTURE IX.

VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

II.

For the purpose of obtaining a comprehensive view of particular branches of knowledge, and of determining the special relations which subsist between them all, modern science has found the form of generalization termed classifi cation, a very efficient, not to say a necessary, instrument. In fact orderly, and what may be called progressive, arrangement, is considered so essential a feature in all scientific method, that the principles of classification have been made. the subject of much profound investigation and philosophic discussion, and they may be said to have been erected into a science of themselves. As an auxiliary to the comprehension of a given classification, and especially as a help to the memory in retaining it, a systematic, and, as some hold, so far as possible, a descriptive, nomenclature is indispensable. The wide range of recent physical science, and the extent to which, in its various applications, it enters into and pervades the social life of the age, have made its dialect in some sort a common medium of intercommunication between men of different races and tongues. And thus Linnæus, the father