kunde, the knowledge of the earth, and Erdbeschreibung, the description of the earth. These ideas are indeed logically distinguishable, because, we may know that which we do not undertake to describe, and we may undertake to describe that which we know, or, as experience unhappily too often shows, that which we do not know; but it is by no means clear that there is any advantage in having a separate word for the expression of every distinguishable shade of human thought. True it is, as is observed by Coleridge, that "by familiarizing the mind to equivocal expressions, that is, such as may be taken in two or more different meanings, we introduce confusion of thought, and furnish the sophist with his best and handiest tools. For the juggle of sophistry consists, for the greater part, in using a word in one sense in the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion." But it is equally true, as the same great master elsewhere remarks, that "It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish." The ramifications and subdivisions of our vocabulary must end somewhere. The permutations and combinations of articulate sounds are not infinite, nor can the human memory retain an unlimited number of words. It is inevitable that in some cases one word must serve to express different ideas, and if they are ideas, from the occasional confusion of which no danger to any great moral or intellectual principle is to be feared, we must be content to trust to the intelligence of our hearers to distinguish for themselves. There is much intellectual discipline in the mere use of language. The easiest disciplines are not necessarily the best, and therefore a vocabulary so complete as never to exercise the sagacity of a reader, by obliging him to choose between two meanings, either of which is possible, would

afford very little training to faculties, of whose culture speech is of itself the most powerful instrument.*

Few will deny that the French chemical nomenclature of Lavoisier's time, which spread so rapidly over Europe, was a highly beneficial improvement in the vocabulary of the branch of knowledge to which it was applied, but it operated in some respects both injuriously to that science and unjustly to the fame of the philosophers whose discoveries had made chemistry what it was. It produced a complete severance between the old and the new, a hiatus in the history, and an apparent revolution in the character, of the science, which has led recent times to suppose that futile alchemy ended, and philosophical chemistry began, with the adoption of the new nomenclature. The reader will find some interesting observations on this point in Liebig's Chemische Briefe, 4te., Auflage, Brief III.

LECTURE X.

THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

III.

THE aphorism, popularly, but perhaps erroneously, ascribed to Buffon, "The style is the man," is a limited application of the general theory, that there is such a relation between the mind of man and the speech he uses, that a perfect knowl edge of either would enable an acute psychological philologist to deduce and construct the other from it. The distinctive characteristics of nations or races employing different tongues, so far as we are able to account for them, are due to causes external to the individual, though common in their operation to the whole people, such as climate, natural productions, modes of life dependent on soil and climate, or, in short, physical conditions.

We might then admit this theory, without qualification, if it were once established that the language of a people is altogether a natural product of their physical constitution and circumstances, and that its character depends upon laws as material as those which determine the hue and growth of the hair, the color of the eyes and skin, the musical quality of the human voice, or the inarticulate cries of the lower an

imals. But those who believe that there is in man a life above organization, a spirit above nature, will be slow to allow that his only instrument for the outward manifestation of his mightiest intellectual energies and loftiest moral aspirations, as well as his sole means of systematic culture for the intellect and heart, can be the product of a mode of physical being, which, though in some points superior in degree, is yet identical in kind, with that shared also by the lowest of the brutes that acknowledge him as their lord and master. Nor is the theory in question at all consistent with observed facts; for while nations, not distinguished by any marked differences of physical structure or external condition, use languages characterized by wide diversities of vocabulary and syntax, individuals in the same nation, the same household, even, display striking dissimilarities of person, of intellect, and of temper, and yet, in spite of perceptible variations in articulation, and in the choice and collocation of words, speak in the main not only one language, but one dialect. History presents numerous instances of a complete revolution in national character, without any radical change in the language of the people, and, contrariwise, of persistence of character with a great change in tongue. The forms of speech, which the slavish, and therefore deservedly enslaved, Roman of the first century of our era employed in addressing Tiberius, were as simple and direct as those of a soldier would have been in conversing with his centurion in the heroic age of Regulus. The Icelander of the twelfth century carried the law of blood for blood as far as the Corsican or the Kabyle of the nineteenth, and when his honor was piqued, or his passions roused, he was as sanguinary in his temper as the Spaniard, the Anizeh-Arab, or the Ashantee. His descendants, speaking very nearly the same dialect, are so

much softened in character, that violence is almost unknown among them, and when, a few years since, a native was condemned to death, not one of his countrymen could be induced to act as the minister of avenging justice. On the other hand, it would be difficult to make out any difference of character, habits, or even ethical system, between the Bedouin of the present day and his ancestors in the time of Abraham and of Job, and yet his language has unquestionably undergone many great changes.

The relations between man and his speech are not capable of precise formulation, and we cannot perhaps make any nearer approach to exact truth than to say, that while every people has its general analogies, every individual has his peculiar idiosyncrasies, physical, mental and linguistic, and that mind and speech, national and individual, modify and are modified by each other, to an extent, and by the operation of laws, which we are not yet able to define, though, in par ticular instances, the relation of cause and effect can be confidently affirmed to exist.

But in the midst of this uncertainty, we still recognize the working of the great principle of diversity in unity, which characterizes all the operations of the creative mind, and though every man has a dialect of his own, as he has his own special features of character, his distinct peculiarities of shape, gait, tone, and gesture, in short, the individualities which make him John and not Peter, yet over and above all these, he shares in the general traits which together make up the unity of his language, the unity of his nation. "Unity of speech," says a Danish writer, "is a necessary condition of the independent development of a people, and the coexistence of two languages in a political state is one of the greatest national misfortunes. Every race has its own or