trodden; and what can surpass in importance or charm, the review of ideas, which have contributed to the uses of the mind and the life of the world?

Among the majority of readers little is known of the treasures of the English tongue. Few American writers have attempted to explore the resources of the language they employ. Our classical and critical scholars have usually thought more of a thorough culture in ancient and foreign languages, than in their own native tongue, and many of them are more familiar with the scientific structure, philosophic forms and grammatical rules of Greek and Latin, than with the Anglo-Saxon speech. Students of the Bible, in their conscientious endeavor to translate accurately the text, and exemplify its meaning, have, in tracing out the idiomatic phrases and verbal distinctions of the Greek and Hebrew, proved the value of a thorough examination into the varied powers of expression and nice adaptation of the English language. It is only of late that much attention has been bestowed upon this branch of education, and this chiefly by English scholars. The admirable investigations of Dean Trench have incited a desire to know more of the curiosities of our vocabulary. His monographs on the study of words have been generally read, and he has contributed other works of value on this subject. The Philological Society announce a large and elaborate edition of Richardson's Historical and Etymological Dictionary. The present discussion upon the great rival lexicographers, Webster and Worcester, and the respective merits of their dictionaries, will increase a scholarly interest in this direction, and promote a general knowledge of our language; though there is danger, however, that the publishers and their advocates will make it too much a mere dispute for financial purposes.

Swinton's Ramble among Woods, we think, has not been so frequently consulted as the works of Trench, though the book has done much to nourish a wish to dig deeper into this rich mine. The lectures of Marsh are the most thorough treatment of this subject, and bring us the latest results from the exploration of our language. They carefully avoid the fields Trench has gleaned so faithfully. They have received emphatic praise from periodical book notices, and have been called incomparable lectures. They will do much to stimulate and enlighten the common intelligence, and

guide and enrich the student's mind. They were written more for public reading than for the professor's text-book. The author has given language a minute study, and also the authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Have we thought enough of the importance of language? It is the truest impress of the genius of man. Had he not been endowed with the power to form and use written and printed words, he would have had no adequate materials to improve the habits of his being. Speech is the distinguishing characteristic and glory of man-his noblest function. It is through language that the mind most perfectly manifests itself; to it he owes all of taste, cultivation, refinement that raises him above the savage. By the aid of it has the whole frame-work of social life been contrived, built up, and furnished with its comforts and elegancies. Had man no means of making known the schemes of his busy brain, the emotions of his palpitating heart, were he without power to divulge his secret purposes, or the knowledge of his experience, his life must have been much like that of the animals: no ships of commerce would have traversed the seas; no harvests of agriculture would have graced the fields; no elegant manufactures would have adorned his home; no civilized states would have arisen with their villages and cities, buzzing with thronging millions, prosperous with enterprise, orderly with law, wise with learning, godly with the Bible, with countless presses, and pulpits, and schoolmasters toiling for human improvement and redemption, with railroads and telegraphs clasping communities in one interest, and connecting them with electric sympathies. By the published and oral words do the arts live and flourish; by them are all the relations of life fostered, and the family and society held together. Man is not superior to the beasts by reason of the senses. The beasts have senses of unerring delicacy; and an acuteness and activity unknown to him. What chiefly constitutes his superiority is his infinitely better mode of exhibiting and communicating thought. The thought of the Divine Being could not have been made known to man without a language; for he is not sufficiently syllabled in the wisdom "which formed the rolling spheres, balanced the dancing universe, and filled immensity with the splendid garniture of the skies." Language, then, is the most important instrument employed by man; no other

is so grand in its uses, or glorious in its results. No study is more worthy his attention.

Let us, then, begin with the origin of language. How came man by it? There have been various theories, as about everything else, some of which never gained an extended hold upon opinion; and it would be useless to refer to them here, except as matters of curiosity. We shall comment upon only two.

One theory ascribes the origin of language to invention. If by this is meant that the idea of language was brought to light just as the art of printing was, or the numerous discoveries that have enriched and adorned social life, the supposition is incredible. In the first place, it is contrary to history. There have been no tribes of savages who were so degraded as not to possess it. No human beings are known to have lived who have not held intercourse with one another by means of it. This is not true of any one of the arts which are developments of civilization. There are hordes that do not know of, or employ the most simple of them. So we conclude that language is not to be put on a level with them.

There are physiological objections to the notion that language is an invention of man. The design of speech is evident in his organization. It is the spontaneous result of the structure of his bodily organs, as much as seeing or feeling. Speaking was not an accident upon which man stumbled in listening to the inarticulate cries by which the lower creatures expressed their natural wants. This wondrous faculty was in him; and he began to use it, just as the bird sings, or the bee constructs its comb; as the impression of thought and feeling, and the objects of nature around him gave occasion. Man did not begin his history as if he were deaf and dumb; he immediately made sounds and attached to them a meaning. Speech is essential to a being of intellectual and moral capacity; for by it he is developed, and without it he must have lived in absolute brutishness. did not progress from the bleatings of herds to vocal articulations by slow lessons, as he has studied out the secrets of this earth ball, and learnt to trace the stars in the milkyHe was created with the faculty of speech all instinct in him and ready for use; like a musical instrument all complete, its trembling strings all in tune. Man carries in

He

him an organ, of which the heaving breast supplies the air to form the voice, and the larynx serves as the pipes to conduct the sound along, and the throat, the tongue, the teeth, and the lips are the keys which mould it according to the pronouncing scale. No improvements have been madenone can be made. on the first manufacture, though it has been in service for the lapse of numberless generations, and may be for countless more.

We must notice a psychological objection to the theory under notice. It is this: We can think only in words. The word is to the thinking faculty what the body is to the spirit. The first use of language is not to communicate, but to originate thought. The mind is at first like an empty house prepared for tenants. These tenants come not in person but in images-in words, their representatives; and each becomes to the mind a new spiritual inheritance. Memory is a catalogue and journal of fleeting impressions, that have left their name and gone away; we are conscious that it is only by signs that we can preserve these old acquaintances, and keep them where we may at any time summon them. The effort to revive a past experience or event is to recall the right word. It is indispensable that everything be labeled that is laid away in the archives of memory, otherwise they are lost forever. Words are the connecting links of association; they are pictures hung up in the mind's studio. No conception or idea can become a currency until it is stamped with a name, nor can it abide clearly in the mind until it has received a definite title.

Let us look at the origin of that class of words employed in the process of thinking, and see how they illustrate this point. Idea Idea sprang from Plato's theory that all things existed in the Divine mind in their perfect archetypes or patterns; and means to see something. Theory and specu lation simply indicate beholding, and hence we call such men as are addicted to them, visionary-given to visions, or acts of seeing, instead of acts of doing. Contemplate is from con and templum-a broad open space, an extensive circuit to look out upon the scenery of things. As we use it, it has an element of sanctity. Imagine is French, and denotes the power of image-making. Fancy, fanatical, phantom, phrase, phenomena, belong to one family, and literally signify to appear, coming before the eye. Reflect

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is to turn about and look backwards. Memory is to retain past images in the mind, and to remember is to recall those images before the view. Discernment is seeing things so as to distinguish and separate them. Think, some say, is from the Latin reor, which is thing, and many trace reason to the same origin. Metaphysics means to get beyond physics. Thus we see the realities of thought are grasped by the help of images. In mathematics we must have figures, algebraic letters and signs, geometric lines, angles and arcs, to aid the most strenuous efforts of the mind. By the use of diagrams and formulas, the astronomer wanders with his calculations into the labyrinths of infinity. The beginning of language, then, must have been coeval with that of thought. The one could have been no more an invention than the other.

Another theory is, that words were spoken to the listening ear of man; that God talked to him in vocal sounds; and man hearing, was taught to speak. Is any light reflected upon the theory in the first chapter of Genesis? There we read that God first suggested the idea of giving names to his creatures. He brought them all before Adam, it is said, to see what he would call them, and whatsoever he called them, that was the name thereof. Trench says, "Man did not begin the world with names, but with the power of naming; for man is not a mere speaking machine; God did not teach him words, as one of us teaches a parrot, from without, but gave him a capacity, and then evolved the capacity which he gave." Man invented names, but did not originate the idea of naming. The name, or image in the mind, was probably suggested by some prominent quality of the object, as it was first impressed upon the beholder. Marsh says, "We know external objects only by their sensuous properties and their action, and we must necessarily suppose all names of objects to have been primarily descriptive, because we can imagine no possible ground of a name, but the ascription of a quality or an act as characteristic of the object named."

We have seen that speech is the natural result of man's organization, and how he was first inducted into the earliest forms of language. We will now proceed to show how a language grows; for man did not begin with it all perfected. He did not start with a full-sized dictionary in hand, with a grammar all constructed according to the laws of syntax,