om the
cabinets and books of the learned, they gradually pass into the speech
of the laity, and become incorporated with the primitive growth. If,
instead of the Carbonate of Soda, the Protoxide of Nitrogen, and other
Chemical Technicalities arbitrarily formed in modern times from the
ancient Greek Language, terms which the ancient Greeks themselves never
heard nor conceived of, we had words derived from similar combinations
of Anglo-Saxon or German Roots; if, for instance, for Protoxide of
Nitrogen, we had the _First-sour-stuffness_, or the
_First-sharp-thingness of Salt-petreness_, and so throughout the immense
vocabulary of chemistry, what an essentially different aspect would the
whole English Language now wear! Had Lavoisier, therefore, chosen the
Anglo-Saxon or the German as the basis of the chemical nomenclature now
in use, we can readily perceive how the intellectual device of a single
savant, would, ere this time, have sent a broad current of new
development through the heart of all the advanced Languages of the
earth; of a different kind wholly, but no more extensive, no more novel,
and truly foreign to the primitive instinctual growth of those
Languages, no more purely the result of intellectual contrivance, than
the current of development to which he actually did give origin.

Lavoisier chose the dead Greek as a fountain from which to draw the
elements of his new verbal compounds, assigning to those elements
arbitrarily new volumes of meaning, and constructing from them, with no
other governing principle than his own judgment of what seemed best, a
totally new Language, as it were, adequate to the wants of the new
Science. Still, despite these imperfections in the method, the demand,
with the growth of the new ideas, for a new expansion of the powers of
Language, in a given direction, made the contrivance of the great
chemist a successful interpolation upon the speech-usages of the world.
It is certainly not therefore inconceivable--because of any governing
necessity that Language should be a purely natural growth--that other
and greater modifications of the speech of mankind may occur; when--not
an arbitrary contrivance upon an imperfect basis and of a limited
application is in question, but--when a real discovery, the revelation
of the true scientific bases of Language, and limitless applications in
all directions, should be concerned.

On the other hand, the extent of the practical applications of strict