922 Dynamic Theory. 



It is obvious that sheep is a later name for the animal than ovis. It 

 occurs in only a portion of the Aryan tongues, which indicates that it 

 came into use after the dispersion, and it was adopted after the introduc- 

 tion of castration. It is therefore not an original name ; but neither is 

 ovis, for it must have come into use after the domestication and petting 

 of the sheep, and there must have been a name for the animal during 

 the ages it ran wild. 



Many root words, and probably most of them after having given rise 

 to derivatives, have themselves become obsolete and lost. This is espec- 

 ially the case with imported words, derivatives often being imported 

 while their primitives are left behind and forgotten. 



In Sanscrit the word for cat is marjara, which is derived from the 

 root mrij, to clean. So the name in Sanscrit means the animal which 

 cleans itself. ( Miiller. ) It is not possible that this was the original 

 name for cat. Savages who probably had but small discrimination be- 

 tween cleanliness and dirtiness anyway, would not be likely to have post- 

 poned naming the cat till a general term for cleaning up had been in- 

 vented. The fact is ( I have no doubt) that the word cat is a far older 

 word than marjara. It cannot be traced to any antecedent root, and is 

 found in many languages. In Irish it is cat ; French, chat ; Dutch, Teat; 

 Danish, kat ; Swedish, katt ; German, kater or katze ; Latin, catus ; Span- 

 ish, gato ; Polish, kot ; Russian, kots ; Welsh, cath. It also occurs in 

 Turanian and Semitic languages. In Turkish it is keti ; in Basque, catua, 

 and in Arabic kitta or kaita is a male cat. It was doubtless a word be- 

 fore the Aryan was distinguished from the Semitic. "We sometimes 

 speak of the cat as a mouser in much the same way as the early Sanscrit 

 people may have spoken of it as the animal that cleans itself the mar- 

 jara ; but with us, mouser has not superseded cat as marjara appears to 

 have done with them. 



The term mouser is from mouse, and this is said to be from the Aryan 

 root mus, to steal. Mouse in Dutch is muis ; Icelandic, mus ; Swede, 

 mus ; Russian, muish ; Latin, mus ; Greek, mus ; Persian, mush. In 

 Sanscrit musha means a rat, a mouse and a stealer ; and mush is to 

 steal. I fail to discover any way to prove that the term mus was used 

 to signify to steal before it was used to signify a mouse. Men had ex- 

 perience of both thieves and mice before they possessed articulate lan- 

 guage ; and which got a name first must be left to conjecture. My 

 guess would be that the mouse, or- rather the rat (as intimated in the 

 Sanscrit ), first received the name, which came afterwards to be applied 

 to the more abstract and involved conception of thief and stealing. The 

 word rat, by the way, is perhaps a later name for an animal which was 

 first called mus. There is an Aryan root rad, which means to scratch, 

 and hence to peck and gnaw. Rat is supposed to be derived from that 



