processes, and products which his every-day experience makes familiar to him, but of which the vast majority, perhaps, of those outside his own line of life know nothing. Ignorant as he may be, he will talk to you of a host of matters which you shall not understand. No insignificant part of the hundred-thousand-word list is made up of selections from such technical vocabularies. Each department of labour, of art, of science, has its special dialect, fully known only to those who have made themselves masters in that department. The world requires of every well-informed and educated person a certain amount of knowledge in many special departments, along with a corresponding portion of the language belonging to each: but he would be indeed a marvel of many-sided learning who had mastered them all. Who is there among us that will not find, on every page of the comprehensive dictionaries now in vogue, words which are strange to him, which need defining to his apprehension, which he could not be sure of employing in the right place and connection? And this, not in the technical portions only of our vocabulary. There are words, or meanings of words, no longer in familiar use, antiquated or obsolescent, which yet may not be denied a place in the present English tongue. There are objects which almost never fall under the notice of great numbers of people, or of whole classes of the community, and to whose names, accordingly, when met with, these are unable to attach any definite idea. There are cognitions, conceptions, feelings, which have not come up in the minds of all, which all have not had occasion and acquired power to express. There are distinctions, in every department of thought, which all have not learned to draw and designate. Moreover, there are various styles of expression for the same thing, which are not at every one's command. One writer or speaker has great ease and copiousness of diction; for all his thoughts he has a variety of phrases to choose among; he lays them out before us in beautiful elaboration, in clear and elegant style, so that to follow and understand him is like floating with the current. Another, with not less wealth of knowledge and clearness of judgment, is cramped and awkward in his use of language;
