faithfully representable by articulate, nor is more than a distant likeness needed in the sign that shall suggest and recall them. The circumstances in which a new word is generated and used contribute no small part toward its correct apprehension, in the first, as in all the after-stages of linguistic growth. The most violent mutilations of form, the most absurd confusions of meaning, committed upon words by very young children, when just learning to talk, do not prevent those who are familiar with them from understanding which of their contracted circle of ideas they are intending to signify: and many a change almost as violent, or a transfer almost as distant, has made part of the regular history of speech, being justified by the exigency that called it forth, and explained by the suggestive conditions of the case. The process of language-making was always in a peculiar sense a tentative one; a searching after and experimental proposal of signs thenceforth to be associated with conceptions. There was not less eagerness and intelligence on the part of the hearer to catch and apprehend than on that of the speaker to communicate; the impulse to a mutual understanding was so strong as to make even a modicum of connection between sign and sense sufficient for its purpose. A wide range of possibilities was thus opened for the designation of any given idea, even though resting upon the same onomatopoetic ground: as, indeed, the present facts of language show us no little variety and dissimilarity in the confessedly imitative names of the same objects.
That distinct and unequivocal signs of onomatopoetic action are not abundantly to be recognized among the earliest traceable constituents of our language is no valid argument against the truth of that view of the origin of speech which we have been defending. It has been a common weakness with the upholders of the onomatopoetic theory, and one which more than anything else, perhaps, has tended to discredit them and it with linguistic scholars, that they claim to point out too much in detail, endeavouring to find imitative etymologies where a more thorough comprehension of the facts and a sounder and less prepossessed judgment see an origin of another and less immediate character. But their
