ations of existing materials, is not altogether extinct, though reduced to a comparatively low grade of activity, and restricted in sphere. To its chief modes of action we have already, in other connections, had occasion to refer. It consists mainly in what we have called the mobilization of our words, the application to them of those formative elements which still remain to us with capacity of living use, and by which we produce both inflections and derivative words, as we have need of them. Increase of these our means of internal development is all but impracticable. Our most recent organically developed suffix is the adverbial ending ly, which has been found above so valuable in illustrating the general method of suffix-formation. Yet not a few elements of Latin origin have won by degrees the right to play an active part in the making of new English words: such are the prefixes en, dis, re, the suffixes ment, ess, able, ous, ic, ize, ism, fy, and others; nor, as we have seen, is the possibility even of farther additions to the list totally cut off. An instance of a rather artificial and abnormal extension of formative apparatus was afforded us by the introduction of the chemical terminology referred to in the last lecture (p. 122); the modern history of scientific nomenclature presents other similar cases; and the exigencies of common use, directed by the custom and authority of the learned, may yet cause some of these ingrafted elements to germinate and flourish as integral parts of the general system of speech. No such results are at all likely to follow from the combination and integration of elements of our own proper language which are now independent. Of composition, as a means of enrichment of our vocabulary, we make at present but a limited use: steamboat and railroad are familiar representatives of a class which, though not inconsiderable in numbers, forms a far less proportion of the modern growth in our tongue than in most others of its kindred.
Such of the needs of language-making as are not supplied by us in the methods already noticed are satisfied by the borrowing of words from other tongues; and this, as every one knows, is an expedient to which excessive resort is had in English. Our dictionaries have been filled up with
