181 



kind to kin, gentle and ^^werous to ^^nus, and the exact equivalence of 

 "benignant" to "generous," each word literally meaning well-bom, 

 " generosus," full of genus, a thorough gentleman, — benignant, of a 

 good genus or stock, well kinned.* 



The similarity of this stem GEN, or KIN, with one signifying 

 knowledge, may suggest to us that in order thoroughly to know and 

 understand a man, a book, or a subject, we must become akin to it, 

 •' must love and admire it, must pass out of ourselves into it." As a 

 popular modem writer has observed, " none know a man thoroughly but 

 his friends ;" in other words, none ken him but those who are kin to 

 him.f From the same or a very similar stem, comes the word Nature, 

 i. e. natura, " that which is ever being bom," similar in its origin to its 

 correlative ^voiq. The connexion of this latter with fu-\, jfi-o, ^-lius, 

 /6?-tu8, fe-mmsL, with the Sanskrit va-man-i, and our own words /e-male 

 and M?o- man, is full of instruction if followed out. J 



The idea of measure underlying such terms as mens, medit&tion, 

 mo</-eration, mod-esty, &c. ; the heavenly character of such words as 

 con-tew_p/-ate from teinpl-um, consider from sid-us, en-tAws-i-asm, 

 meaning, as Madame de Stael observes, " God in us."§ The similarity 

 between res and rear, thing and think, and the German ding and 

 denken, are also eminently suggestive. Not otherwise is it with the 

 circumstance that the Greek and Latin terms for matter, are primarily 

 used to signify timber. I am aware that modern etymologists derive 

 materia from mater, supposing it to signify the mother or original 

 source from which any thing proceeds ; but it appears much more 

 natural to suppose its original meaning, like that of vXrj, to have been 

 wood, more especially as it is used in that sense by classical authors, 

 and the term for wood in Spanish is madera, probably connected with 



* Compare also jrnavas, t. e. gen-eivun. 



+ Mr. Trench, in his delightful little book, " The Study of Words," obsenros that the 

 connexion of kin and kind has not escaped that master of language, Shakspeare, whose 

 " A little more than kin and less than kind," is familiar to us all. 



I Considering the evident relation of the terms, and the rery common interchange 

 between t; and w, it seems curious how any one could ever have mistaken the derivation of 

 this word ; ami yet there are few words about which more blunders have been made. One 

 of the most absurd of these is that of Verstegan, (reproduced by more than one modern 

 commentator on the Bible,) who asserts that woman is a contraction of womb-man, the 

 man with a womb. I observe that in a very clever and eminently suggestive little 

 book, written in part by Mr. William Rushton, (formerly of this town,) while the first part 

 of the word is given correctly, it is divided as fem-ina, ina being considered as a tenuination. 

 {Terminational Dictionary,^. 21.) That this is an erroneous view admits of easy proof, 

 from a couiparison of the forms male and fe-male with ho-oitn and fe-mm. The Mm is 

 another form of our " man," and fe-min-a is " the producing man." Comp. hu-man-us. 



§ Perhaps some of these words, like fiavia, lun atic, "jotnai," "mercurial,'" *' faiumine,** 

 " disa«troas," " ill-starred," and others, may hare an astrological origin. 



