or of Ulphilas; and held to their state of science also:  for I am sure they had no words which could have conveyed the ideas of oxygen, cotyledons, zoophytes, magnetism, electricity, hyaline, and thousands of others expressing ideas not then existing, nor of possible communication in the state of their language.  What a language has the French become since the date of their revolution, by the free introduction of new words!  The most copious and eloquent in the living world; and equal to the Greek, had not that been regularly modifiable almost ad infinitum.  Their rule was, that whenever their language furnished or adopted a root, all its branches in every part of speech, were legitimated by giving them their appropriate terminations: 

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And this should be the law of every language.  Thus, having adopted the adjective fraternal, it is a root which should legitimate fraternity, fraternation, fraternization, fraternism, to fratenate, fraternize, fraternally.  And give the word neologism to our language, as a root, and it should give us its fellow substantives, neology, neologist, neologization; its adjectives, neologous, neological, neologistical; its verb, neologize; and adverb neologically.  Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage.  Society is the work-shop in which new ones are elaborated.  When an individual uses a new word, if ill formed, it is rejected in society, if well formed, adopted, and after due time, laid up in the depository of dictionaries.  And if, in this process of sound neologization, our trans-Atlantic brethren shall not choose to accompany us, we may furnish, after the Ionians, a second example of a colonial dialect improving on its primitive.

But enough of criticism:  let me turn to your puzzling letter of May the 12th, on matter, spirit, motion, &c.  Its crowd of scepticisms kept me from sleep.  I read it, and laid it down:  read it, and laid it down, again and again:  and to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, ‘I feel, therefore I exist.’  I feel bodies which are not myself:  there are other existences then.  I call them matter.  I feel them changing place.  This gives me motion.  Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space.  On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.  I can conceive thought to be an action of a particular organization of matter, formed for that purpose by its creator, as well as that attraction is an action of matter, or magnetism of loadstone.  When he who denies to the Creator the power of endowing matter with the mode of action called thinking, shall show how he could endow the sun with the mode of action called attraction, which reins the planets in the track of their orbits, or how an absence of matter can have a will, and by that will put matter into motion, then the Materialist