GESTUEE-LANQUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 57 



the whole range of art and. belief among mankind^ the prin- 

 ciple is continually coming more and more clearly into view, 

 that man has not only a definite reason, but very commonly an 

 assignable one, for everything that he does and believes. 



In the only departments of language of whose origin we 

 have any clear notion, as for instance in the class of pure imi- 

 tative words such as " cuchoo," ''feeivit," and the like, the con- 

 nection between word and idea is not only real but evident. 

 It is true that different imitative words may be used for the 

 same sound, as for instance the tick of a clock is called also 

 fick in Germany ; but both these words have an evident resem- 

 blance to the unwriteable sound that a clock really makes. So 

 the Tahitian word for the crowing of cocks, craoa, might be 

 brought over as a rival to " cock-a-doodle-doo ! " There is, 

 moreover, a class of words of undetermined extent, which seem 

 to have been either chosen in some measure with a view to 

 the fitness of their sound to represent their sense, or actually 

 modified by a reflection of sound into sense. Some "such pro- 

 cess seems to have made the distinction between to crash, to 

 crush, to cruncli, and to craunch, and to have differenced to 

 flip, to flap, to flop and to flumj), out of a common root. Some 

 of these words must be looked for in dictionaries of " pro- 

 vincialisms," but they are none the less English for that. In 

 piire interjections, such as oh ! ah ! the connection between 

 the actual pronunciation and the idea which is to be conveyed 

 is perceptible enough, though it is hardly more possible to 

 define it than it is to convey in vsT-iting their innumerable mo- 

 dulations of sound and sense. 



But if there was a living connection between word and idea 

 outside the range of these classes of words, it seems dead now. 

 We might just as well use " inhabitable " in the French sense 

 as in that of modern English. In fact Shakspeare and other 

 writers do so, as where Norfolk says in ' Eichard the Second,' 



" Even to the frozen ridges of the Alps, 

 Or any other gi-ouud inhabitable." 



It makes no practical difference to the world at large, that 

 our word to " rise " belongs to the same root as Old German 

 risan, to fall, French arrisei; to let fall, whichever of the two 



