two so disconnected and unlike that they may not derive themselves historically, through a succession of intermediate steps, from one another or from the same original. The varieties of significant change are as infinite as those of phonetic change; and, as in dealing with the latter, so, here again, we must limit ourselves to pointing out and exemplifying the leading principles and more prominent general methods.
The fundamental fact which makes words to be of changeable meaning is the same to which we have already had to refer as making them of changeable form; namely, that there is no internal and necessary connection between a word and the idea designated by it, that no tie save a mental association binds the two together. Conventional usage, the mutual understanding of speakers and hearers, allots to each vocable its significance, and the same authority which makes is able to change, and to change as it will, in whatever way, and to whatever extent. The only limit to the power of change is that imposed by the necessity of mutual intelligibility; no word may ever by any one act be so altered as to lose its identity as a sign, becoming unrecognizable by those who have been accustomed to employ it. Eleēmosunē is reducible to a'ms, but only through a series of intermediate stages, of which the German almosen, the Anglo-Saxon almes, and our spelling alms are representatives; the change of significant content which it has at the same time undergone, from 'feeling of pity or compassion' to one of the practical results of such a feeling, is comparatively inconsiderable, not more than we are in the constant habit of making at a single step. Our corresponding word of Latin derivation, charity, while little altered in form from its original, caritas, 'dearness,' has suffered a much more distant transfer of signification. Priest, again, from the Greek presbūteros, 'an older person,' has wandered from its primitive to about equal distance in form and in meaning; the one departure taking place under physical inducements, brought about by an impulse to economize physical effort on the part of those who had to utter the word; the other accompanying a historical change in the character and functions of an official originally chosen
