484 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



in danger of being produced by the blunders of translators. The writers 

 of telegrams, and the foreign correspondents of newspapers, have gone on 

 so long translating demander by " to demand," without a suspicion that it 

 means only to ask, that (the context generally showing that nothing else 

 is meant) English readers are gradually associating the English word de- 

 mand with simple asking, thus leaving the language without a term to 

 express a demand in its proper sense. In like manner, " transaction," the 

 French word for a compromise, is translated into the English word trans- 

 action ; while, curiously enough, the inverse change is taking place in 

 France, where the word " compromis " has lately begun to be used for ex- 

 pressing the same idea. If this continues, the two countries will have ex- 

 changed phrases. 



Independently, however, of the generalization of names through their 

 ignorant misuse, there is a tendency in the same direction consistently 

 with a perfect knowledge of their meaning ; arising from the fact, that the 

 number of things known to us, and of which we feel a desire to speak, 

 multiply faster than the names for them. Except on subjects for which 

 there has been constructed a scientific terminology, with which unscientific 

 persons do not meddle, great difticulty is generally found in bringing a 

 new name into use ; and independently of that difficulty, it is natural to 

 prefer giving to a new object a name which at least expresses its resem- 

 blance to something already known, since by predicating of it a name en- 

 tirely new we at first convej'- no information. In this manner the name of 

 a species often becomes the name of a genus ; as salt, for example, or oil; 

 the former of which words originally denoted only the muriate of soda, 

 the latter, as its etymology indicates, only olive-oil; but which now de- 

 note large and diversified classes of substances resembling these in some 

 of their qualities, and connote only those common qualities, instead of 

 the whole of the distinctive properties of olive-oil and sea-salt. The words 

 glass and soap are used by modern chemists in a similar manner, to denote 

 genera of which the substances vulgarly so called are single species. And 

 it often happens, as in those instances, that the term keeps its special sig- 

 nification in addition to its more general one, and becomes ambiguous, that 

 is, two names instead of one. 



These changes, by which words in ordinary use become more and more 

 generalized, and less and less expressive, take place in a still greater degree 

 with the words which express the complicated phenomena of mind and so- 

 ciety. Historians, travelers, and in general those who speak or write con- 

 cerning moral and social phenomena with which they are not familiarly ac- 

 quainted, are the great agents in this modification of language. The vo- 

 cabulary of all except unusually instructed as well as thinking persons, is, 

 on such subjects, eminently scanty. They have a certain small set of words 

 to which they are accustomed, and which they employ to express phenom- 

 ena the most heterogeneous, because they have never sufficiently analyzed 

 the facts to which those words correspond in their own country, to have 

 attached perfectly definite ideas to the words. The first English conquer- 

 ors of Bengal, for example, carried with them the phrase landed proprietor 

 into a country where the rights of individuals over the soil were extremely 

 different in degree, and even in nature, from those recognized in England. 

 Applying the term with all its English associations in such a state of 



spelling of the classical English writers, are not aware that the meaning of sanatory, if there 

 were such a word in the language, would have reference not to the preservation of health, but 

 to the cure of disease. 



