When looking over a list of men’s names in a foreign language, as of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name.  The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat.  As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them.  It is as if they had been named by the child’s rigmarole,—­Iery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan.  I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect.  The names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless as Bose and Tray, the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known.  It would be necessary only to know the genus, and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual.  We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own,—­because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.  At present our only true names are nicknames.  I knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called “Buster” by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian name.  Some travellers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit.  It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them.  A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me.  It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods.  We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.  I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket.  It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration.  I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—­a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity.  When we should still be growing children, we are already little men.  Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—­not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!