referred to (men, mice, feet, etc.), and the few words, like oxen from ox, in which we have retained relics of another mode of declension, once belonging to a large class of nouns. The prevalence which this suffix has attained in our language has been plausibly conjectured to be in part due to the influence of the French-speaking Normans, in whose own tongue s was the plural-sign in all nouns, having become such by a similar extension of its original Latin use.
This extensibility of application is a part of the essential and indispensable character of a formative element. We have not to go over and over again with the primitive act of composition and the subsequent reduction, in each separate case. It needs only that there be words enough in familiar use in a language, in which a certain added element distinctly impresses a certain modification of meaning upon certain plainly recognizable primitives, and we establish a direct association between that element and the given modification of meaning, and are ready to apply the former wherever we wish to signify the latter. The ending ly, for instance, we use when we want to make an adverb, without any thought of whether the adjective like would or would not be properly combinable with the word to which we add the ending. This alone makes it possible to mobilize, so to speak, our linguistic material, to use our old and new words in all the circumstances among which they are liable to fall. We adopt into our common speech a new term like telegraph; it was manufactured out of the stores of expression of the ancient Greek language, by some man versed in that classic tongue, and is implicitly accepted, under the sanction and recommendation of the learned, by the public at large, who neither know nor care for its etymology, who know only that they want a name for a thing, and that this answers their purpose. It thus becomes to all intents and purposes an English word, a naturalized citizen in our tongue, invested with all the rights and duties of a native—and divested, also, of those which belonged to it by hereditary descent, among its own kith and kin. We proceed, accordingly, to apply to it a whole apparatus of English inflections, long since worked out by the processes of linguistic change, and
