imagined Polynesians in their new Icelandic home. Doubtless there was never before in the history of the world a time when men were accumulating with such rapidity knowledge of the past history and present constitution of the whole universe of created things—knowledge which is not, it is true, necessarily wisdom or virtue, but which can and ought to turn to both. A part, now, of this new knowledge—and a part of the highest importance to the general community—is such as calls for no change whatever in language, because it consists only in the better understanding of things long since observed and named. However much astronomy and physics may teach us respecting the sun and the planets, we continue to call them as of old; the words heat, cold, light, green, blue, red stand their ground in general use, notwithstanding the new vibratory theories, and the wonderful discoveries lately made in the spectrum of colours; pudding-stone is pudding-stone, and trap is trap, now as before the geologist had explained the origin of either; substances still fall to the earth and rise and float in the air, even after the discovery of gravitation; rubbed amber and the loadstone attract, as they did ere men had heard of electricity and magnetism as cosmical forces. There is, and evidently in the nature of the case can be, no limit to the extent to which a language may thus become impregnated with clearer knowledge and deeper meaning; and it has been already pointed out (p. 21) that the speech of different individuals at the same period may vary to almost any degree in the implication of these qualities, not less than the speech of the general community at different periods. But in great part, also, the modern additions to knowledge have been of such a sort as to demand the provision of a store of new signs: they have included an immense number of new particulars, things before unobserved or confounded with others under the same names, but which, being made the subject of distinct conceptions, have come to require specific appellations, that men might communicate with one another respecting them. Even this want has in some measure been filled without external change of the language, by the internal development of its resources, as illustrated in the preceding lecture, by the
