though they replaced it in time by other words. Words, like all other things, will die, and why they should live on in one soil and wither away and perish in another, is not always easy to say. What has become of ignis, for instance, in all the Romance languages? It has withered away and perished, probably because, after losing its final unaccentuated syllable, it became awkward to pronounce; and another word focus, which in Latin meant fire-place, hearth, altar, has taken it place.
Suppose we wanted to know whether the ancient Aryans before their separation knew the mouse: we should only have to consult the principal Aryan dictionaries, and we should find in Sanskrit mush, in Greek jus, in Latin mus, in Old Slavonic myse, in Old High German wAs, enabling us to say that, at a time so distant from us that we feel inclined to measure it by Indian rather than by our own chronology, the mouse was known, that is, was named, was conceived and recognised as a species of its own, not to be con- founded with any other vermin.
And if we were to ask whether the enemy of the mouse, the cat, was known at the same distant time, we should feel justified in saying decidedly, No. The cat is called in Sanskrit man/ara and vic^ala. In Greek and Latin the words usually given as names of the cat, yatr] and alXovpos, mustella and/efo's, did not originally signify the tame cat, but the weasel or marten. The name for the real cat in Greek was /carra, in Latin catus, and these words have supplied the names for cat in all the Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic languages. The animal itself, so far as we know at present, came to Europe from Egypt, where it had been worshipped for centuries and tamed ; and as this arrival
