not see why the rattling sound of stones should not give them a claim to the same pedigree,—­the name being afterwards transferred to the larger mass, the reverse of which we see in the popular rock for stone.  Nay, as Mr. Wedgwood (sub voce draff, p. 482) assumes rac (more properly rk) as the root, it would answer equally well for rock also.  Indeed, as the chief occupation of crags, and their only amusement, in mountainous regions, is to pelt unwary passengers and hunters of scenery with their debris, we might have creag, quasi caregos faciens sive dejiciens, sicut rupes a rumpere.  Indeed, there is an analogous Sanscrit root, meaning break, crack.  But though Mr. Wedgwood lets off this coughing, hawking, spitting, and otherwise unpleasant old patriarch Rac so easily in the case of the foundling Crag, he has by no means done with him.  Stretched on the unfilial instrument of torture that bears his name, he is made to confess the paternity of draff, and dregs, and dross, and so many other uncleanly brats, that we feel as if he ought to be nailed by the ear to the other side of the same post on which Mr. Carlyle has pilloried August der starke forever.  But we honestly believe the old fellow to be belied, and that he is as guiltless of them as of that weak-witted Hebrew Raca who looks so much like him in the face.

[Footnote a:  An etymology of this kind would have been particularly interesting in the hands of so learned and acute a man as Mr. Wedgwood.  It would have afforded him a capital example of the fact that considerable differences in the form and sound of words meaning the same thing prove nothing against the onomatopoeic theory, but merely that the same sound represents a different thing to different ears.  L. Boare, mugire, E. moo; F. beugler, E. bellow; G. leuen, L. lugere, E. low, are all attempts at the same sound, or, which would not affect the question, variations of an original radical go or gu.  For a full discussion of the matter, admirable for its thorough learning, see Pictet, Les Origines Indo-Europeennes, Vol.  I. Section 86.]

In the case of crag, Mr. Wedgwood argues from a sound whose frequency and marked character (and colds must have been frequent when the fig-tree was the only draper) gave a name to the organ producing it.  We can easily imagine it.  One of these early pagans comes home of an evening, heated from the chase, and squats himself on the damp clay floor of a country-seat imperfectly guarded against draughts.  The next morning he says to his helpmeet, “Mrs. Barbar, I have a dreadful cold in my—­hrac! hrac!” Here he is interrupted by a violent fit of coughing, and resorts to semeiology by pointing to his throat.  Similar incidents carrying apprehension (as Lord Macaulay would say) to the breezy interiors of a thousand shanties on the same fatal morning, the domestic circle would know no name so expressive as hrac for that fatal tube through which man, ingenious in illegitimate perversion, daily compels the innocent breath to discharge a plumbeous hail of rhetoric.