what they could do in this particular walk of human effort; and the variety of product shows the difference of human endowment in this regard, even more strikingly than the variety of the art-products of different peoples exhibits their diverse grade and kind of artistic power to conceive and execute.
For, as has been already pointed out, and must here again be insisted on, every single act in the whole process of making words and forming language, at every period of linguistic development, has been a human act. Whether more or less deliberately performed, it was always essentially of the same kind; it was something brought about by the free action of men. Its reasons lay in human circumstances, were felt in human minds, and prompted human organs to effort. No name was ever given save as a man or men apprehended some conception as calling for expression, and expressed it. Every idea had its distinct existence before it received its distinctive sign; the thought is anterior to the language by which it is represented. To maintain the opposite, to hold that the sign exists before the thing signified, or that a conception cannot be entertained without the support of a word, would be the sheerest folly; it would compel us to assert that galvanism could not be recognized as a new form of natural force, hitherto undescribed, until its discoverers had decided what to style it; that Neptune was not visible in the astronomer's glass till it had been determined after which of the Grecian divinities it should be christened; that the spinner's mule and jenny were not built till the inventor had chosen a name for them; that the aniline colours made upon the eye no impressions distinguishable from those of hues long familiar until the battle-fields had been pitched upon whose names they should bear; that the community had no appreciation of the frequent tediousness and impertinence of official forms until they had agreed to call it red tape; that the human race did not see that the colour of growing things like leaves and grass was different from those of the clear sky, of blood, of earth, of snow, until, from the name for growing, they had worked out for it a name green, as well as, by some similar process, like names for the
