THE PRINCIPLE OF ECONOMY IN EVOLUTION. 7,7,^ 



"bos'n," "God be with, you !'^ to " Good-by ! " and in tbe slang 

 wbicli in portions of tlie United States has begun to dwarf " How 

 do you do ? " into " Howdy ? " 



There is abundant scope for economy in all the forms of liter- 

 ary expression. Not only do we avoid as far as possible redun- 

 dant elements, we also choose words calculated to convey our 

 meaning with the minimum of effort on the part of the reader or 

 listener. Where our end is simply that of intelligibility, as in 

 the case of scientific statement, we choose words as simple and as 

 expressive as possible; where to the end of intelligibility are 

 added the ends of style, we employ words more ornate and pic- 

 turesque in their character. In most prose compositions we are 

 satisfied if we succeed in conveying our meaning ; in most poet- 

 ical compositions we seek, in addition to the end of intelligibility, 

 to produce emotional excitement, to call the imagination into 

 powerful activity, and to give rise to various pleasing effects, such 

 as those of rhyme and alliteration. But whatever are our ends in 

 composition, and however multifarious they may be, we alwaj^s 

 strive to reach them in the completest way and with the least 

 possible demand upon the attention of the persons whom we are 

 addressing. The sparing use of metaphor and parenthesis, the 

 placing of the stronger epithets after instead of before the weaker, 

 the avoidance of long and involved sentences, the care taken not 

 to repeat words already used instead of their synonyms, the pro- 

 vision for variety which excludes monotony both of thought and 

 of style, the observance of a best arrangement for the words in a 

 sentence, the choice of particular material for the various para- 

 graphs of a composition, and the construction of the links by 

 which unity is secured for the whole treatment all this is ordered, 

 as far as is possible in each individual case, so as to produce a 

 maximum of effect with a minimum of material. 



How intolerant men are of speech elements unnecessary to in- 

 telligibility is shown by the drift of the educated and uneducated 

 alike toward a phonetic spelling by the gradual doing away with 

 inversion in both word and sentence, and by the growing tend- 

 ency to use adjectives as adverbs, to discard subtleties like the 

 subjunctive, and break down the well-established distinction be- 

 tween " shall " and " will." The economy which has taken place 

 in the domain of grammatical forms is shown both in their 

 gradual acquirement as means to the increased intelligibility of 

 speech, and in the haste with which the mind, no longer needing 

 them, hastened to discard the scaffolding of the structure which 

 with their aid it had built up. The enormous gain which has 

 been secured by the dropping of inflection may be appreciated 

 somewhat by reference to the clumsy paraphernalia of such un- 

 developed languages as Zulu, in which, as translated by Dr. Bleek, 



