HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



i7 



that an honest burly Yorkshireman is waiting for an 

 opportunity to speak, and I will ask him to proceed. 

 " You see, sir, if you understood proper English, you 

 could not speak of a mud-capped dyke, because in 

 our language the word dyke means a pool of water, a 

 pond, or even a stream." And, as though I had not 

 been sufficiently taken to task already, half-a-dozen 

 country folk from various parts of the kingdom rush 

 upon me and say : "Don't you know that dyke is 

 only another name for ditch ? " What am I to say ? 

 Must I plead guilty, and assure my friends that, before 

 I write such things again, I will make sure that I 

 know what I am doing ; or must I stand on the 

 defensive, and try to prove that I am right in speaking 

 of a mud-capped dyke? "You need do nothing of 

 the kind," says a North-country farmer. I knew 

 well enough what you meant, for we have plenty such 

 things in my part of the country, and I reckon we 

 speak as good English as they do anywhere." Bravo ! 

 Another champion says : " Let your learned critics 

 only turn over the pages of their provincial diction- 

 aries and they will find such entries as these : 

 " Dike, a dry hedge (Cumberland) ; a wall {Scotland). 

 To Dyke, to enclose with ramparts, walls, or 

 ditches. Dyker, one who builds enclosures of 

 stone." 



We thus find that the word dyke, or dike, has the 

 following meanings : — ■ 



(1) A ditch or trench, either dry, or containing 

 water. 



(2) A pool, pond, or tank. 



(3) A wall, embankment, or rampart. 



(4) A vein of lava embedded in rock. 



It will not, I think, be difficult to show that these 

 forms of dyke are each entitled to the name ; and 

 this we can do graphically and historically. Thus — 



Dyke 



i Dry ditch 

 [Wet ditch 



I Embankment ; earth cast up. 

 Rampart, military defence. 

 Wall made of earth, then of stone. 

 Wall formed by lava. 

 iMarsh drain — still or flowing. 

 <Pond or tank, dead water. 

 (Stream, or living water. 



If now we take the word and examine it historically 

 (or, which is much the same thing, etymologically), 

 we shall arrive at the same result. The provincial 

 and literary forms, ditch, dike, dyke, dick, dik, 

 diche, all point back to an earlier form, which in 

 Anglo-Saxon was written die. In our modern word 

 ditch the final letter has been softened or weakened, 

 but in the other forms of the word the final letter has 

 retained the power and value of k. Now in Anglo- 

 Saxon the word die meant a ditch, mound, bank, 

 moat, trench or foss. The same word is found in the 

 Scandinavian languages (Swedish dike, Icelandic diki, 

 Dutch dijk, Danish digc), with a similar meaning. 

 In German, where it is written Teich, it means a pond 

 or pool (as in Yorkshire) ; in Greek it is teichos, a 

 wall (as in Cumberland and Scotland), and thus we 

 reach the Sanskrit form dehi, a wall or rampart. 



Here, however, we find ourselves on not only 

 classical, but sacred ground, for our word dyke 

 having been traced back to India, we now learn that 

 in early times the root from which it springs gave 

 rise to other interesting shoots and branches. Per- 

 haps the most interesting word for us, which is 

 associated with the word dyke, is the familiar term 

 Paradise. Let Professor Max Miiller, in his inimi- 

 table style, tell the story. 



"After the phonetic laws of each language had 

 been more carefully elaborated, it was but too 

 frequently forgotten that words have a history as well 

 as a growth, and that the history of a word must be 

 explored first, before an attempt is made to unravel 

 its growth. Thus it was extremely tempting to 

 derive paradise from the Sanskrit para-desa. The 

 compound para-d&ra was supposed to mean the 

 highest or a distant country, and all the rest seemed 

 so evident as to require no further elucidation. 

 Paradej-a, however, does not mean the highest or a 

 distant country in Sanskrit, but is always used in the 

 sense of a foreign country, an enemy's country. 

 Further, as early as the Song of Solomon (iv. 13), 

 the word occurs in Hebrew (see marginal reading) as 

 pardes, and how it could have got there straight from 

 Sanskrit requires at all events some historical 

 explanation. In Hebrew, the word might have been 

 borrowed from Persian, but the Sanskrit word para- 

 deja, if it existed at all in Persian, would have been 

 paradaesa. Such a compound, however, does not 

 exist in Persian, and therefore the Sanskrit word 

 parad&ra could not have reached Hebrew vid 

 Persia. 



"It is true, nevertheless, that the ancient Hebrew 

 word pardes is borrowed from Persian, viz., from the 

 Zend pairidaha, which means a piece of ground 

 enclosed by high walls (circnmvallatio), afterwards 

 a park, a garden. The root in Sanskrit is dih or 

 DHIH, and means originally to knead, to squeeze 

 together, to shape. From it we have the Sanskrit 

 dehi, a wall, while in Greek the same root, according 

 to the strictest phonetic rules, yielded toichos, wall. 

 In Latin our root is regularly changed into fig, and 

 gives us figulus, a potter, figura, form or shape, and 

 fingere. In Gothic it could only appear as deig-an, to 

 knead, to form anything out of soft substances ; hence 

 daig-s, the English dough, German Deich (Chips, 

 iv. 23)." 



It is beside my present purpose to pursue the 

 history of this common but interesting word further. 

 It will suffice that our mud-capped dyke has led us 

 gradually in thought to Paradise itself, and no one will 

 complain that a journey is tedious when it terminates 

 so happily as this. 



Our reflections, however, have only now com- 

 menced, and having explained what a dyke is, it is 

 necessary ere we proceed further to explain the sense 

 in which the word is here employed. It is well- 

 known to many of my readers that in various parts of 



