of human circumstances, that the investigation of language is an inquiry into the internal and external history of men. The results of such investigation are of the most varied character. Sometimes we find at the basis of a word a mere blunder of philosophy, as when we talk about lunatics, as if we still believed the aberration of their wits to depend upon the devious motions of the moon (luna); or a blunder of natural history, as when we call our own native American feathered biped a turkey, in servile imitation of that ill-informed generation of Englishmen, which, not knowing whence he came, but surmising that it might probably enough be Turkey, dubbed him "the Turkey fowl;" or a blunder of geography, as when we style our aborigines Indians, because the early discoverers of this continent set their faces westward from Europe to find India, and thought at first that they had found it. Copper, the magnet, parchment commemorate for us the countries Cyprus, Magnesia, and Pergamos, whence those substances were first brought to the founders of our civilization. Manumit, like candidate, owes its existence to a peculiar Roman custom—of dismissing, namely, with a slap of the hand a slave made free. Money and mint (two different forms of the same original, moneta, the one coming from the French monnaie, the other from the Anglo-Saxon mynet) tell of Roman superstition and Roman convenience: within the imperial city was raised a temple to Juno Moneta, 'Juno the Monisher,' in recognition of the supernatural monitions the goddess had given them in certain crises of their history; and in this temple, as it chanced, was set up the first stamp and die for coining money. We say calculate, because the early Romans reckoned by the aid of little pebbles (calculi). We call a truckling and unscrupulous parasite a sycophant, because it once pleased the men of Athens to pass a law forbidding the exportation of figs from Attica; which, as is apt to be the case with such laws, was little more than a dead letter; while yet there were found in the community certain mean fellows who sought to gain their selfish ends by blabbing, or threatening to blab, of those who violated it (sūko-phantēs, 'fig-blabber'). We put on a "pair of rubbers," because, when that most multifariously
