the designation of various objects having a shape roughly resembling some one of the moon's varying phases. A popular superstition connects with these last some of the phenomena of insanity, and so the same word lune has to signify also 'a crazy fit', while a host of derivatives—as lunatic, lunacy; as moon-struck, mooning, mooner—attest in our common speech the influence of the same delusion.
This elasticity of verbal significance, this indefinite contractibility and extensibility of the meaning of words, is capable of the most varied illustration. Among all the various workmen who take rough materials and make them supple or smooth, the arbitrary choice of our Germanic ancestors, ages ago, designated the worker in metal as the one who should be styled the smith. At a much later period, when the convenience of a more developed social condition created a demand for surnames, certain individuals of this respectable profession took from it the cognomen of Smith. Then, just as the name smith had been divorced from its connection with the more general idea of smooth, and restricted to a certain class of smoothers, so now, the name Smith was cut loose from the profession, and limited to these particular individuals and their belongings. Yet, as such, it became the nucleus of a new class-extension, in which the tie of consanguinity was substituted for that of common occupation; and, although all smiths are not Smiths, the Smiths are now even more numerous than the smiths. Every proper name, not less than every common noun, goes back thus to an individual appellation, having a historical ground, and is determined in its farther application by historical circumstances. Thus, to take a more dignified example, the first Cæsar was so styled from some fact in his life—the authorities are at issue from what particular one: whether from his unnatural mode of birth (a cæso matris utero), or from his coming into the world with long hair (cæsaries), or from his slaying a Mauritanian elephant (cæsar in Mauritanian speech). His descendants then inherited from him the same name, without having to show the same reason for it; and the preëminent greatness and power of one among them made it a part of the permanent title of him who ruled the
