1^6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



example, not by any inward impulse. Some of us, indeed, know that 

 the word has a curious history that it is akin to heech, and for the 

 reason that beechen staves or tablets were the first material used by 

 our rude ancestors for cutting runes upon. But this is merely a mat- 

 ter of learned curiosity ; our knowledge or want of knowledge, our 

 belief or disbelief in the explanation when given us, has nothing to do 

 with our use of the term hook ; we use it because others tliose with 

 whom it is our lot to have to do in life also use it, because we can 

 communicate with them by means of it. If we, though of English 

 blood, had happened to be born at Paris, at Rome, at Cairo, at Pe- 

 king, we should either have learned to use a different word from this, 

 or another besides it, in the same sense and for the same reason even 

 as in English-speaking communities, especially in America, descend- 

 ants of half the races under heaven use book as their " native " sign, 

 knowing absolutely nothing of any other. 



But what is thus true of hook is true also of every other sign of 

 which our language is composed, unless we may have committed in a 

 few instances that rare act, the coining of a word. And this is already 

 of itself enough to show that in a perfectly proper indeed, in the only 

 genuine sense, our words are arbitrary and conventional signs : arbi- 

 trary, not because no reason can be given for the assignment of each 

 word to its use, but because the reason is only an historical, not a ne- 

 cessary one, and because any other of the hundred current, or of the 

 ten thousand possible, signs might have been made by us to answer 

 precisely the same purpose ; conventional, not because it was voted in 

 a convention (what that we call "conventional" ever was so?), nor 

 because men came to an explicit understanding about it in any other 

 way, but because its adoption by us had its ground in the consenting 

 usage of our community. There is no way of denying these two epi- 

 thets to language, except by misunderstanding their meaning. 



Moreover, it is not the case that the learner gives birth first to an 

 independent and adequate conception of a book, and then merely ac- 

 cepts from others the name by which he shall call it. For the ' inner 

 form," not less than for the outer sign, he is dependent on his teach- 

 ers. He would not, indeed, even begin to use the word if he had not 

 formed some sort of an idea of a thing which it stood for ; but he 

 knows next to nothing about the thing j it is to him a mystery of 

 which he only later obtains the key, and which he does not fully un- 

 derstand till after he has studied the history of civilization, a whole 

 chapter of which is, in a manner, ejiitomized in the single term. And 

 all this is given him in measure, as he is prepared to receive it, by the 

 teaching of others. A further example or two will show this depend- 

 ence still more clearly. The idea of planet came down to us as de- 

 fined and named by our instructors, the Greeks, and named from the 

 most superficially obvious property of the objects designated, that of 

 " wandering," or moving amid the other stars. No uninstructed 



