28 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tions fail to exemplify the process. The prevalence of names of rank 

 on the Continent, often remarked, reaches in some places great extremes. 

 In Mecklenburg, says Captain Spencer, " it is computed that the nobil- 

 ity include one-half of the pojDulation. . . . At one of the inns I found 

 a Herr Graf [count] for a landlord, a Frau Grafin [countess] for a land- 

 lady, the young Herren Grafen filled the places of hostler, waiter, and 

 boots, while the fair young Fraulein Grafinnen were the cooks and 

 chambermaids. I was informed that in one village .... the whole of 

 the inhabitants were noble except four." 



French history shows us more clearly perhaps than any other the 

 stages of diflFusion. Just noting that in early days, while madame was 

 the title for a noble lady, inademohelle was used to the wife of an ad- 

 vocate or physician, and that when, in the sixteenth century, madame 

 descended to the married women of these middle ranks, mademoiselle 

 descended from them to the immarried women, let us look more espe- 

 cially at the masculine titles sire^ seigneur^ sieur, and monsieur. Set- 

 ting out with sire^ as an early title for a feudal noble, we find, from a 

 remark of Montaigne, that in 1580, though still applicable in a higher 

 sense to the king, it had descended to the vulgar, and was not used for 

 intermediate grades. Seigneur, introduced later as a feudal title, while 

 sire was losing its meaning by diffusion, and for a period used alterna- 

 tively with it, became, in course of time, contracted into sieur. ^y- 

 and-by sieur also began to spread to those of lower rank. Afterward, 

 reestablishing a distinction by an emphasizing prefix, there came into 

 use monsieur ^ which, as applied to great seigneurs, was new in 1321, 

 and which came also to be the title of sons of kings and dukes. And 

 then by the time that monsieur also had become a general title among 

 the upper classes, sieur had become a bourgeois title. Since "which 

 time, by the same process, the early sire and the later sieur, dying out, 

 have been replaced by the universal monsieur. So that there appear 

 to have been three waves of diffusion : sire, sieur, and monsieur, have 

 successively spread downward. 



How by this process high titles eventually descend to the very low- 

 est, we are shown most startlingly in Spain, where " even beggars ad- 

 dress each other as Senor y Caballero — Lord and Knight." 



For form's sake, though scarcely otherwise, it is needful to point 

 out how we are taught here the same lesson as before. The title-giving 

 among savages which follows victory over a foe, brute or human, and 

 which literally or metaphorically distinguishes the individual by his 

 achievement, unquestionably originates in militancy. Though the more 

 general names father, king, lord, elder, and their derivatives, which 

 afterward arise, are iiot directly militant in their implications, yet they 

 are indirectly so ; for they are the names of rulers evolved by militant 

 activity, who habitually exercise militant functions : being in early 

 stages always the commanders of their subjects in battle. Down to 



