128 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. III. 



History. Seeing it can injure none now, and may amuse many, 

 there seenis no reason why it should not appear in our pages. 



" It is now nearly four years since the courts of the Univer- 

 sity rang with a debate which for a long time engrossed public 

 attention. There was as yet no Maga, and the world was not 

 enlightened by the wisdom of the disputants. It is not our 

 intention to do more than merely allude to it, as a fitting intro- 

 duction to the subject under consideration. 



" Among the literary students arose a question concerning the 

 proper pronunciation and etymology of the word generally 

 spelled and pronounced museum. After much wrangling and 

 turbulent debate, the disputants divided into three sects, to one 

 of which each student interested in the progress and result of 

 the discussion joined himself. 



" The first party, or disciples of the old school, advocated the 

 common or vulgar pronunciation already referred to, declaring 

 that the word in question was derived from the Latin musa, since 

 the first cabinets were dedicated to the Muses. 



" The second sect, the disciples of the middle school, reversed 

 the sound of the word, and named it as if it were written muz- 

 zeum, scoffed at the invocation of etymology as fitted to deter- 

 mine the point, and rested the truth of their doctrines on some 

 new laws of euphony, deciphered from one of the manuscripts 

 found in Pompeii. 



" The views of the third party (which included all the stars 

 about college) supplanted in the minds of all men of calm and 

 sober intellect the opinions already considered. They declared 

 the right pronunciation to be museum, contending that the word 

 was derived from the Latin mus, a mouse, since, though cabinets 

 may come to contain elephants, camelopards, and even mam- 

 moths in the course of years, yet must they all have begun by 

 enshrining the stuffed skin of a mouse. True it is that the 

 illustrious Pillans, seconded by the learned Scholtenbruner, held 

 it to be against all classical precedent to derive a word from the 

 nominative and not from the genitive ; but as the pages of the 

 Maga are as open to them as to us, and there being no claim on 

 us to record their reasons and arguments, we unconditionally 

 advocate the common -sense view of the question. 



