266 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



assertion respecting heathens who lived in the country, 

 there was no need for a separate word to denote them ; 

 and pagan came not only to mean heathen, but to 

 mean that exclusively. 



A case still more familiar to most readers is that 

 of the word villain, or villein. This term, as every- 

 body knows, had in the middle ages a connotation as 

 strictly defined as a word could have, being the proper 

 legal designation for those persons who were the sub- 

 jects of the least onerous form of feudal bondage, 

 those serfs who were adscript! glebes. The scorn of 

 the semibarbarous military aristocracy for these their 

 abject dependants, rendered the act of likening any 

 person to this class of men a mark of the greatest 

 contumely: the same scorn led them to ascribe to the 

 same people all manner of hateful qualities, which 

 doubtless also, in the degrading situation in which 

 they were held, were often not unjustly imputed to 

 them. These circumstances combined to attach to the 

 term villain, ideas of crime and guilt, in so forcible a 

 manner, that the application of the epithet even to 

 those to whom it legally belonged became an affront, 

 and was abstained from whenever no affront was 

 intended. From that time guilt was part of the 

 connotation; and soon became the whole of it, since 

 mankind were not prompted by any urgent motive to 

 continue making a distinction in their language 

 between bad men of servile station and bad men of 

 any other rank in life. 



These and similar instances in which the original 

 signification of a term is totally lost another and an 

 entirely distinct meaning being first engrafted upon the 

 former, and finally substituted for it afford examples 

 of the double movement which is always taking place 

 in language : the counter-movements, one of Generali- 



