476 ^Yiscons^7l Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



left of me, Booh behind me, vollejed and thundered. At last 

 it da^vned on my darkness that no insulting English vocables 

 were in the minds of the vooif erators but that they were only in- 

 forming me that I must go to the end of the office, au bout! 



Ko theme so comes home to all men's business and bosoms as 

 personal names. Some savor of their significance pervades all 

 literature sacred and profane — downward from the Bible and 

 Homer. The earliest family quarrel we read of was when an 

 Attic farmer who never spent anything had taken a wife who 

 counted nobody respectable that did not keep a horse. In 

 naming their first boy he insisted on a name with the element 

 saving in it, while she would hear of none which lacked the 

 syllable horse. By way of compromise the name Phoidippides, 

 that is son of a saving horse was invented and adopted. 



Personal names being then of such varied interest cosmopol- 

 itan, pre-historic, post-historic, con-historic, sub-historic, no 

 one should essay to treat the general subject in fewer pages 

 than the thousand of Pott, indeed were Pott now writimr and 

 in regard to our American poly-glott and panti-glott direc- 

 tories his book would become doubly ponderous. 



Broadly speaking personal names may be said to be derived 

 from tliree sources, namely, first, some characteristic, actual, 

 imagined or ascribed, secondly, one's occupation, and thirdly, 

 his T3lace of abode. Before tracins; a name, however, to anv 

 one of these sources w^e must often ascertain tlie meaning of 

 obsolete words or forms of words in our own toncrue, or studv 

 foreign lang^iages, or become conversant with many varieties 

 of industry nov^ no longer known or carried on by new pro- 

 cesses. 



In the following article the names chosen for illustrating the 

 subject are of persons well known in Madison, but those of peo- 

 ple in any other town or those of authors on the backs of books 

 in any library would have been equally sendceable for the 

 writer's purpose. 



The earliest personal names were naturally given in view of 

 some personal characteristic. 



Hence oris^inated the first Pairchild and the first Brown. 

 Morris, tliat is Moorish, is another name for darJc hroivn. 



