childhood in respect to other matters; as, for instance, the food, the dress, the moral nurture. Just as some have to rough their way by the hardest through the scenes of early life, beaten, half-starved, clad in scanty rags, while yet some care and provision were wholly indispensable, and no child could have lived through infancy without them—so, as concerns language, some get but the coarsest and most meagre instruction, and yet instruction enough to help them through the first stages of learning how to speak. In the least favourable circumstances, there must have been constantly about every one of us in our earliest years an amount and style of speech surpassing our acquirements and beyond our reach, and our acquisition of language consisted in our appropriating more and more of this, as we were able. In proportion as our minds grew in activity and power of comprehension, and our knowledge increased, our notions and conceptions were brought into shapes mainly agreeing with those which they wore in the minds of those around us, and received in our usage the appellations to which the latter were accustomed. On making acquaintance with certain liquids, colourless or white, we had not to go through a process of observation and study of their properties, in order to devise suitable titles for them; we were taught that these were water and milk. The one of them, when standing stagnant in patches, or rippling between green banks, we learned to call, according to circumstances and the preference of our instructors, pool or puddle, and brook or river. An elevation rising blue in the distance, or towering nearer above us, attracted our attention, and drew from us the staple inquiry "What is that?"—the answer, "A mountain," or "A hill," brought to our vocabulary one of the innumerable additions which it gained in a like way. Along with the names of external sensible objects, we thus learned also that practical classification of them which our language recognizes; we learned to distinguish brook and river; hill and mountain; tree, bush, vine, shrub, and plant; and so on, in cases without number. In like manner, among the various acts which we were capable of performing, we were taught to designate certain ones by specific titles: much reproof,
