observation that it well becomes the scholar to investigate their origin. In the same manner in English very many words seem to me to come under this category. Before, however, I advert to them, I will call your attention to another word which has puzzled our Etymologists exceedingly, the word Hurricane. Dean Trench has justly scouted the derivation as a specimen of the absurd ones, to which I referred in the beginning of this Paper, as bringing discredit on Etymology itself, that of its hurrying the canes off the field, and in his English Past and Present p. 13, seems though doubtingly to assent to its having been "derived from the Caribbean islanders." Todd and Richardson have the French Ouragan and the Spanish Huracan, the former adding the Su. Gothic hurra, to move rapidly or violently, as the original, while the latter says it is "a word which the French Etymologists suppose to have been picked up by the Voyagers to the West Indies and signifying in the language of the Islanders the four winds blowing at the same time the one against the other." And he refers to the quotation from Dampier, which is in these words, "I shall speak next of hurricanes, these are violent storms raging chiefly among the Carribbee islands &c." It is well Richardson does not name the French Etymologist who writes so strangely about "the four winds blowing at the same time the one against the other." I have been witness of several hurricanes of which I shall speak immediately, and I never witnessed or heard of such a thing. But to go to the derivation of the word — Ouragan has no meaning in French nor Huracan in Spanish. But in Basque, and here I come again to the line of my argument, it has a meaning, 'Urac' waters and 'an' a common termination, being for the adverb 'in' or 'there,' and giving the word Uracan a signification of a collection of waters. Here then we come to a very important question in our inquiries, the history and original meaning of words, and we find this word to have very much changed its original meaning. Neither Todd nor Richardson seem to have been aware of it, having overlooked the passage in the Tempest, in which it is expressly stated,
The watery spout which sailors hurricanoes call.
In Lear the same meaning is implied
Blow winds and crack your cheeks Your cataracts and hurricanoes spout,
And in Drayton's Moon Calf are the following lines
And down the shower impetuously doth fall Like that which men the hurricano call
