148 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ditional. By these and other similar means, language is continually 

 adapted by its speakers to express the modified content of their minds. 

 At the same time, it sufiers change of a yet more intimate and uncon- 

 scious kind as an instrument ; its phonetic shape being rendered more 

 manageable, and its grammatical shape as well ; new words of relation 

 are made, by the attenuation of more material elements, and now and 

 then, in a kindred way, a new form. 



So far as a language is handed down from generation to genera- 

 tion by the process of teaching and leai-ning, it is stable, and by this 

 means it does remain nearly the same ; so far as it is altered by the 

 consenting action of its users, it is unstable, and it does in fact change. 

 Examine any language, and you will find it different from its prede- 

 cessor ; difierent in a variety of items of the kinds instanced above, 

 each of them being obviously the work of the speakers, and showing 

 no signs of the presence of any other force. In the present stage of 

 what we call the growth of language, nothing takes place which is not 

 the effect of human agency ; the only obscurity about it grows out of 

 the fact that there is involved the consenting action of a community, 

 since language is a social institution, and exists primarily and con- 

 sciously for the purpose of communication. But if this is so nowa- 

 days, then it was so in the period next preceding, and in the one be- 

 fore that ; and so on, until the very beginning is reached. For we 

 have no right to assume unnecessarily that the processes of growth 

 have essentially changed ; that is to say, if the methods of word- 

 making and form-making as exhibited in the historical period are 

 sufficient to account for the whole existing material of speech, we are 

 not authorized to postulate others. 



And such is the case. Forms have been made, through all the his- 

 torical periods, by the combination of independent elements, and the 

 reduction of one of them to a formal value by means of changes of 

 form and changes of meaning, such as are exhibited in every part of 

 language ; and this action, varying in kind and degree under the 

 changing circumstances of developing speech, can never, so far as at 

 present appears, be proved insufficient to explain the structure of lan- 

 guage. If there are problems of structure as yet unsolved, they may 

 be expected to yield to more skilled investigation ; or, if they do not, 

 it will be presumably because of the loss of needed evidence. The 

 name-making process implies only the christening of a formed idea, 

 the provision of a sign which shall henceforth be associated with a 

 pai-ticular conception, and used to represent it in social intercourse 

 and in the operations of thought. And the sign is obtained just where 

 it can be most conveniently found, according to the circumstances and 

 habits of each particular community. There is nothing approaching 

 to necessity in an etymology. It is only a tie of convenience that 

 connects the new name with its source : in the case of hook, the tie of 

 historical development out of an accidental selection of material ; in 



