THE LAW OF LIKENESS, AND ITS WORKING. 



551 



originally it was meant to express the sense of 

 oppression and choking, it would be due to a 

 sympathy of passivity, rather than activity ; and 

 a sound uttered from sympathy of passivity comes 

 very near to an interjectional or mimetic sound. 



Prof. Noire has, I believe, struck a new vein, 

 but when he comes to work out his theory more 

 in detail, he will probably find that the prim- 

 itive centres of force from which the endless 

 rays of thought radiated, do not all lie in the 

 same direction. Locke ' remarked, long ago, and 

 others had done so before him, that all words ex- 

 pressive of immaterial ideas are derived from 

 words expressive of material subjects. " By 

 which," as he adds, " we may give some kind of 

 guess what kind of notions they were, and whence 

 derived, which filled their minds who were the 

 first beginners of language." Nothing is more 

 likely than that their daily occupations should 

 have supplied the first concepts through which 

 the framers of language gradually laid hold of 

 everything that attracted their attention. If 

 they had a word for plaiting or weaving, they 

 could derive from it not only the name of the 

 spider, but likewise of the poet who weaves words 

 and thoughts together. I agree with Aufrecht 

 that we should derive from a root vabh, to spin, 

 the Sanskrit urnavabhi, spider, Greek $<pos, web, 

 and v^lvos, poem, while Greek expressions such as 

 S6\ovs Kal nrjriv fxvdovs Ka\ /x7]5ea, oi/fo5o^juoTa, 

 o\&ov, KTjpbv xxpalveiv, show how many branches 

 may spring from one single stem. The same 



root, in its simpler form, vap, gives us the Greek 

 ij-Tptov, warp. The roots vabh, however, and vap 

 before they came to mean weaving, meant throw- 

 ing, also sowing ; and in an intransitive sense, 

 even our modern verb to wabble, clearly onomato- 

 poetic, according to Mr. Wedgwood, has been 

 traced back historically to that root by Prof. 

 Pott. 



I fully agree, therefore, with Noire, that the 

 primitive occupations of man, and the sounds 

 which accompany them, would supply ample ma- 

 terials for carving out of them a complete diction- 

 ary. I also agree with him that man finds the 

 most natural metaphors for the expression of 

 natural phenomena by referring them to himself, 

 by looking upon them anthropopathically. When 

 the color red had to be expressed he called it a 

 crying color, a bitter taste was a biting taste, a 

 shrill note was a sharp-cutting note. All this is 

 true, and much more. But though I willingly 

 say fvpj]Kat to Prof. Noire, I still think we ought 

 not to shut all other doors that may lead into the 

 dark passages of language, and that we ought, in 

 our searchings after the earliest ramifications of 

 human thought and human language, to guard 

 against nothing more than against the arch-enemy 

 of all truth — dogmatism. 



I hope in a future article to show more in de- 

 tail how the gradual development both of the 

 material and of the framework of reason, the so- 

 called categories, may be studied by means of an 

 historical analysis of language. 



— Contemporary Review. 



THE LAW OF LIKENESS, AND ITS WOEKING. 



By Dr. ANDREW WILSON. 



THAT the offspring should bear a close re- 

 semblance to the parent forms one of the 

 most natural expectations of mankind, while the 

 converse strikes us as being an infringement of 

 some universal law that is not the less recogniz- 

 able because of its unwritten or mysterious char- 

 acter. " The acorn," says a great authority on 

 matters physiological, "tends to build itself up 

 again into a woodland giant such as that from 

 whose twig it fell ; the spore of the humblest 

 lichen reproduces the green or brown incrusta- 

 tion which gave it birth ; and at the other end of 

 the scale of life, the child that resembled neither 

 1 "Lectures on the Science of Language," ii., p. 3T3. 



the paternal nor the maternal side of the house 

 would be regarded as a kind of monster." Thus 

 true is it of the humblest as of the highest being, 

 that the law of likeness or "heredity," as it has 

 been termed, operates powerfully in moulding the 

 young into the form and resemblance of the par- 

 ent. But the law that is thus admitted to be so 

 universal in its operation exhibits, at the same 

 time, very diverse readings and phases. The 

 likeness of the parent may be attained in some 

 cases, it is true, in the most direct manner, as, 

 for example, in the higher animals and plants, 

 where the egg or germ, embryo, and seed, become 

 transformed through a readily-traced process of 



