88 DE. LAEDNEE ; PROF. WHITNEY. 



is, however, in tliis, as in all things, an adverse class 

 of able but innately conservative thinkers who have 

 always great capacity for pronouncing dogmatically 

 as to what cannot be true or can never be accomplished ; 

 and sometimes it occurs that their croaking proph- 

 ecies of impossibility are refuted almost before 

 they are uttered, by the actual accomplishment. An 

 illustration occurs in what is popularly attributed to 

 Dr. Lardner in respect to the impossibility of navi- 

 gating the ocean by steam. Of the same character 

 will be found to be such utterances upon the subject 

 now under consideration as the following ex cathedra 

 announcement by the learned Professor Whitney, of 

 Yale : " That some degree of such subjective correspond- 

 ence, felt more distinctly in certain cases, less so in 

 others, may have sometimes suggested to a root 

 proposer, by a subtle and hardly definable analogy, one 

 particular complex of Sounds rather than another, as. 

 the representative of an idea for which he was seek- 

 ing expression, need not be absolutely denied. Only, in 

 admitting it, and seeking for traces of its influence, 

 we must beware of approximating in any degree to 

 that U'ildest and most absurd of the many vagaries re- 

 specting language, the doctrine of the natural and in- 

 herent significance of articulate sounds." 1 



1 " Language and the Study of Language," by Win. Dwight 

 Whitney, Professor of Sanscrit and Instructor in Modern Lan- 

 guages, in Yale College, p. 430. This last expression, " the inher- 

 ent significance of articulate sounds," seems probably to have 

 been quoted from previous publications of my own. The italics, 

 in the above extract, have been supplied by myself, to exhibit both 

 the admissions and the assumptions of this dictum. S. P. A. 



