. -VARIATIONS IN MEANING OF TERMS. 485 



things ; to one who had only a limited right they gave an absolute right, 

 from another because he had not an absolute right they took away all 

 right, drove whole classes of people to ruin and despair, filled the country 

 with banditti, created a feeling that nothing was secure, and produced, with 

 the best intentions, a disorganization of society which had not been pro- 

 duced in that country by the most ruthless of its barbarian invaders. Yet 

 the usage of persons capable of so gross a misapprehension determines the 

 meaning of language ; and the Avords they thus misuse grow in generality, 

 until the instructed are obliged to acquiesce; and to employ those words 

 (first freeing them from vagueness by giving them a definite connotation) 

 as generic terms, subdividing the genera into species. 



§ 4. While the more rapid growth of ideas than of names thus creates a 

 perpetual necessity for making the same names serve, even if imperfect- 

 ly, on a greater number of occasions ; a counter-operation is going on, by 

 which names become on the contrary restricted to fewer occasions, by tak- 

 ing on, as it Avere, additional connotation, from circumstances not originally 

 included in the meaning, but which have become connected with it in the 

 mind by some accidental cause. We have seen above, in the words pagan 

 and villain, remarkable examples of the specialization of the meaning of 

 words from casual associations, as well as of the generalization of it in a 

 new direction, which often follows. 



Similar specializations are of frequent occurrence in the history even of 

 scientific nomenclature. " It is by no means uncommon," says Dr. Paris, 

 in his Pharmacologia* "to find a word which is used to express general 

 characters subsequently become the name of a specific substance in which 

 sucli characters are predominant; and we shall find that some important 

 anomalies in nomenclature may be thus explained. The terra Apcrevkov, 

 from which the word Arsenic is derived, was an ancient epithet applied to 

 those natural substances which possessed strong and acrimonious proper- 

 ties ; and as the poisonous quality of arsenic was found to be remarkably 

 powerful, the term was especially applied to Orpiraent, the form in M^iich 

 this metal most usually occurred. So the term Verbena (quasi Herbena) 

 originally denoted all those herbs that were held sacred on account of their 

 being employed in the rites of sacrifice, as we learn from the poets; but as 

 one herb was usiwlly adopted upon these occasions, the word Verbena came 

 to denote that particular herb on^y, and it is transmitted to us to this day 

 under the same title, viz., Verbena or Vervain, and indeed until lately it en- 

 joyed the medical reputation which its sacred origin conferred upon it, for 

 it was worn suspended around the neck as an amulet. Vitriol, in the orig- 

 inal application of the word, denoted any crystalline body with a certain 

 degree of transparency {vitrtmi) ; it is hardly necessary to observe that the 

 term is now appropriated to a particular species: in the same manner, 

 Bark, which is a general terra, is applied to express 07ie genus, and by way 

 of eminence it has the article The prefixed, as T/ie bark ; the same obser- 

 vation will apply to the word Opium, which, in its primitive sense, signifies 

 any juice (ottoc, Sucous), while it now only denotes 0)ie species, viz., that of 

 the poppy. So, again, Elaterium was used by Hippocrates to signify vari- 

 ous internal applications, especially purgatives, of a violent and drastic na- 

 ture (from the word iXavvu), agito, inoveo, stimnlo), but by succeeding au- 

 thors it was exclusively applied to denote the active matter which subsides 



* Historical Introduction, vol. i. , pp. 66-68. 



