I cannot help thinking that your correspondent, from his dislike “to be puzzled on so plain a subject,” has a misapprehension as to the uses of etymology.  I, too, am no etymologist; I am a simple inquirer, anxious for information; frequently, without doubt, “most ignorant” of what I am “most assured;” yet I feel that to treat the subject scientifically it is not enough to guess at the origin of a word, not enough even to know it; that it is important to know not only whence it came, but how it came, what were its relations, by what road it travelled; and treated thus, etymology is of importance, as a branch of a larger science, to the history of the progress of the human race.

Descending now to particulars, let your correspondent show me how “news” was made out of “new.”  I have shown him how I think it was made; but I am open to conviction.

I repeat my opinion that “news is a noun singular, and as such must have been adopted bodily into the language;” and if it were a “noun of plural form and plural meaning,” I still think that the singular form must have preceded it.  The two instances CH. gives, “goods” and “riches,” are more in point than he appears to suppose, although in support of my argument, and not his.  The first is from the Gothic, and is substantially a word implying “possessions,” older than the oldest European living languages.  “Riches” is most unquestionably in its original acceptation in our language a noun singular, being identically the French “richesse,” in which manner it is spelt in our early writers.  From the form coinciding with that of our plural, it has acquired also a plural signification.  But both words “have been adopted bodily into the language,” and thus strengthen my argument that the process of manufacture is with us unknown.

Your correspondent is not quite correct in describing me as putting forward as instances of the early communication between the English and the German languages the derivation of “news” from “Neues,” and the similarity between two poems.  The first I adduced as an instance of the importance of the inquiry:  with regard to the second, I admitted all that your correspondent now says; but with the remark, that the mode of treatment and the measure approaching so near to each other in England and Germany within one half century (and, I may add, at no other period in either of the two nations is the same mode or measure to be found), there was reasonable ground for suspicion of direct or indirect communication.  On this subject I asked for information.

In conclusion, I think I observe something of a sarcastic tone in reference to my “novelty.”  I shall advocate nothing that I do not believe to be true, “whether it be old or new;” but I have found that our authorities are sometimes careless, sometimes unfaithful, and are so given to run in a groove, that when I am in quest of truth I generally discard them altogether, and explore, however laboriously, by myself.