photograph and telegraph are brought in and naturalized, fitted with all the inflectional apparatus which the language possesses, without any further consequences. Such are mere additions to speech, which may affect the sum and aggregate value of its resources of expression, often to a considerable extent, without modifying its organism, or altering its grammatical form, its apprehension of relations and command of the means of signifying them. And yet, the same circumstances which lead to the great and rapid development of a vocabulary—especially where it takes place out of native resources, and in a less conscious and artificial way—may have an indirect effect upon grammatical development also; where so much change is going on, so much that is new coming into use, the influence will naturally be felt in some measure in every part of the language. Hints of such a possibility are discoverable even in the modern history of our own speech: graph, for example, has been brought in as the final member of so many new compounds that it almost presents itself to the consciousness of English speakers as a formative element, having a given office, and so constituting a part of the apparatus of English derivation; while ism, though of ultimate Greek origin, and coming to us through the French, has become a thoroughly English suffix, admitting of the most familiar and extended application in forming new words. So distinct, indeed, is our apprehension of the specific value of the ending ism that we are able to cut it off and make an independent word of it, talking of a person's isms, or of his favourite ism—as we also speak, less familiarly, of ana, 'personal reminiscence and anecdote,' or, in a half-humorous way, of the ologies, 'branches of learned study.'
We cannot, perhaps, better illustrate this subject of the modes of linguistic change as determined in their respective degree of operation by the influence of circumstances, than by briefly examining the way in which our own speech is now adapting itself to the growing needs of its speakers. The call upon it for increase of expressiveness during the past century and at the present time has been and is hardly less than would have been that upon the dialect of our
