gist's ever-recurring inquiry. To answer it successfully he needs a combination of many qualities; he must be, in fact, a whole court in himself: the acuteness, perseverance, and enterprise of the advocate must be his, to gather every particle of testimony, every analogy, every decision, bearing upon the case in hand; he must play the part of the opposing counsel, in carefully sifting the collected evidence, testing the character and disinterestedness of the witnesses, cross-examining them to expose their blunders and inconsistencies; he must have, above all, the learning and candour of the judge, that he may sum up and give judgment impartially, neither denying the right which is fairly established, nor allowing that which rests on uncertain allegation and insufficient proof. In short, the same gifts and habits of mind which make the successful historian of events are wanted also to make the successful historian of words.
The ill-repute in which etymology and those who follow it are held in common opinion is a telling indication of the difficulty attending its practice. The uncertainty and arbitrariness of its prevailing methods, the absurdity of its results, have been the theme of many a cutting and well-directed gibe. It has in all ages been a tempting occupation to curious minds, and always a slippery one. An incalculable amount of human ingenuity has been wasted in its false pursuit. Men eminent for acuteness and sound judgment in other departments of intellectual labour have in this been guilty of folly unaccountable. It has been often remarked that the Greeks and Romans, when once engaged in an etymological inquiry, seem to have taken leave of their common sense. Great as were the advantages offered by the Sanskrit language to its native analysts, in the regularity of its structure and the small proportion of obscure words which it contained, they stumbled continually as soon as they left the plain track of the commonest and clearest derivations, and their religious, philosophical, and grammatical books are filled with word-genealogies as fanciful and unsound as those of the classic writers. In no one respect does the linguistic science of the present day show its radical superiority to that of former times more clearly
