ETYMOLOGY. 13 



is meant the tracing of. words from their roots through all the various 

 ramifications into which accident caprice or convenience has distributed 

 them. This exercise is both interesting and profitable and furnishes at 

 the same time a fund of information, whilst the imagination may be 

 highly gratified. Here the mind becomes enlarged, its love of order 

 and system is gratified and its judgment strengthened. 



Take as an illustration of one form, the word 5r/A«$ the primitive 

 I signification is hair or icool thrown into the form of cloth, with which 

 tlie ancient Greeks lined their helmets. Then they discovered that they 

 could wear the lining of the helmet without the brass, and the word was 

 applied to a woolen or hair cap. When the people of Athens however 

 became very refined and luxurious, they applied the term only to the 

 caps of the poorer classes. .After tlie word was used to denote a cap, 

 it signified with the qualifying adjective XxXKovi a hemlet or brazen cap. 

 Tiien it branched out from the parent stock into various connexions 

 which need not be enumerated. Now it will be readily seen what a 

 mental exercise this is for the student anxious to arrive at inteHectual 

 maturity. Here we see how the manners and customs of the people, 

 their views and feelings, their modes of thought and action, all modify 

 the language, and through this variety of modification, the mind pursues 

 its eager inquiries up to the parent stock and root. But this is not all. 

 Consider the connexion which this process establishes with other lan- 

 guages as exhibited in this single word and a new field opens to our as- 

 tonished view : a field as extended and vast as the generations of the 

 human race. Here we will discover that one language does not stand 

 isolated and detached from the rest, but that there is a common bond of 

 union more intimate or remote among all the languages of the earth. — 

 f^'rom the word ^(Aas we derive the Latin word jnlus^ the hair of any 

 creature, pilciis a cap, the German word Jilz, the Saxon felt, the Eng- 

 lish felt, pelt, jieltrij, etc. Now look at this word in its ground-form 

 as it existed long before the birth of Homer, and follow it down the 

 stream of time amid the vicissitudes of fortune and the convulsions of 

 nature down to the present form in our own language, which may or 

 may not be the last language in which it will form a constitutional part 

 and say, is not the science of language wonderful, and does it not pre- 

 sent to us one of the most interesting monuments of the human mind, 

 — time worn indeed, yet venerable — which it is capable of contempla- 

 ting } 



Take the word (rvi<.o<p uvnn as another illustration. Tliis woid is 

 compounded of c-vxov nfg, and (pctivw to show to inform. During 

 a season of dearth, when provisions were scarce at Athens, it was deem- 



