modern science has been pouring in of late upon the general aggregate of knowledge. Think, for example, of the perplexity of the naturalist who returns from an exploring tour with a thousand new species of plants and animals, if he were compelled to devise vernacular designations for them all! And how useless the effort! They will remain for ever unknown to nineteen twentieths, perhaps, of those who speak his speech, and if one or another of them should ever become introduced to general knowledge, they would easily enough acquire familiar names. No modern language, then, whatever its superiority to the English in the capacity of internal growth, attempts to fill such departments of expression otherwise than by borrowing from the Latin and Greek, happy in the possession of stores so rich, so accessible, and so manageable, to draw upon. The names of animal and vegetable species, of their parts and specific differences, of mineral elements and compounds, of processes and relations, and so forth, are Latin or Latinic through the whole civilized world. If the German is more inclined to favour terms of native growth, and for hydrogen, oxygen, acid, says "water-substance" (wasserstoff), "sour-substance" (sauerstoff), "sourness," (säure), and the like, it may be seriously doubted whether the gain is of appreciable value. We have seen how little the act of association which binds together idea and sign is dependent upon the aid of etymological suggestiveness; and the forcing of a great variety of new specific meanings in a brief space of time upon the old material of a tongue may make quite as much for confusion as for intelligibility and vividness of expression. It is comparatively easy for a community to provide out of its vernacular resources of speech for that ordinary growth of knowledge, experience, and wisdom which comes in the main by the working over of conceptions already acquired and named, and only in lesser degree by the apprehension of new particulars; but we have only to rejoice that our language is by fortunate circumstances saved from a strain which the present conditions of our culture would otherwise have put upon it, and which is more severe than any living tongue has ever been obliged to endure.
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