as many sources, German, Danish, Saxon, French, and Roman, which were the different nations amalgamated into the British empire.  We retain little of the real old english—­few words which may not be traced to a foreign extraction.  Different people settling in a country would of course carry their ideas and manner of expressing them; and from the whole compound a general agreement would, in process of time, take place, and a uniform language be established.  Such is the origin and condition of our language, as well as every other modern tongue of which we have any knowledge.

There is one practice of which our savans are guilty, at which I do most seriously demur—­the extravagant introduction of exotic words into our vocabulary, apparently for no other object than to swell the size of a dictionary, and boast of having found out and defined thousands of words more than any body else.  A mania seems to have seized our lexicographers, so that they have forsaken the good old style of “plainness of speech,” and are flourishing and brandishing about in a cloud of verbiage as though the whole end of instruction was to teach loquacity.  And some of our popular writers and speakers have caught the infection, and flourish in borrowed garments, prizing themselves most highly when they use words and phrases which no body can understand.

I will not contend that in the advancement of the arts and sciences it may not be proper to introduce foreign terms as the mean of conveying a knowledge of those improvements to others.  It is better than to coin new words, inasmuch as they are generally adopted by all modern nations.  In this way all languages are approximating together; and when the light of truth, science, and religion, has fully shone on all the nations, we may hope one language will be spoken, and the promise be fulfilled, that God has “turned unto the people a pure language, that they may call upon the name of the Lord, to serve him with one consent.”

New ideas are formed like new inventions.  Established principles are employed in a new combination, so as to produce a new manifestation.  Words are chosen as nearly allied to former ideas as possible, to express or represent this new combination.  Thus, Fulton applied steam power to navigation.  A new idea was produced.  A boat was seen passing along the waters without the aid of wind or tide.  Instead of coining a new word to express the whole, a word which nobody would understand, two old ones were combined, and “steamboat” became the sign to represent the idea of the thing beheld.  So with rail-road, cotton-mill, and gun-powder.  In the same way we may account for most words employed in science, although in that case we are more dependant on foreign languages, in as much as a large portion of our knowledge is derived from them.  But we may account for them on the same principle as above. Phrenology is a compound of two greek words, and means the science or knowledge of the mind.  So of geology, mineralogy, &c.  But when improvements are made by those who speak the english, words in our own language are employed and used not only by ourselves, but also by those nations who profit by our investigations.