hich way of spelling should continue, and wholly
supersede the other, and which, while the alternative remains, we should
ourselves employ, can only be settled by settling which of these
etymologies deserves the preference. So is it, for example, with
'ch_y_mist' and 'ch_e_mist', neither of which has obtained in our common
use the complete mastery over the other{277}. It is not here, as in some
other cases, that one is certainly right, the other as certainly wrong:
but they severally represent two different etymologies of the word, and
each is correct according to its own. If we are to spell 'ch_y_mist' and
'ch_y_mistry', it is because these words are considered to be derived
from the Greek word, {Greek: chymos}, sap; and the chymic art will then
have occupied itself first with distilling the juice and sap of plants,
and will from this have derived its name. I have little doubt, however,
that the other spelling, 'ch_e_mist', not 'ch_y_mist', is the correct
one. It was not with the distillation of herbs, but with the
amalgamation of metals, that chemistry occupied itself at its rise, and
the word embodies a reference to Egypt, the land of Ham or 'Cham'{278},
in which this art was first practised with success.

{Sidenote: '_Satyr_', '_Satire_'}

Of how much confusion the spelling which used to be so common, 'satyr'
for 'satire', is at once the consequence, the expression, and again the
cause; not indeed that this confusion first began with us{279}; for the
same already found place in the Latin, where 'satyricus' was continually
written for 'satiricus' out of a false assumption of the identity
between the Roman _satire_ and the Greek _satyric_ drama. The Roman
'satira',--I speak of things familiar to many of my hearers,--is
properly a _full_ dish (lanx being understood)--a dish heaped up with
various ingredients, a 'farce' (according to the original signification
of that word), or hodge-podge; and the word was transferred from this to
a form of poetry which at first admitted the utmost variety in the
materials of which it was composed, and the shapes into which these
materials were wrought up; being the only form of poetry which the
Romans did _not_ borrow from the Greeks. Wholly different from this,
having no one point of contact with it in its form, its history, or its
intention, is the 'satyric' drama of Greece, so called because Silenus
and the 'Satyrs' supplied the chorus; and in their naive selfishness,
and mere ani