in danger of being produced by the blunders of translators. The writers of telegrams, and the foreign correspondents of newspapers, have gone on so long translating demander by "to demand," without a suspicion that it means only to ask, that (the context generally showing that nothing else is meant) English readers are gradually associating the English word demand with simple asking, thus leaving the language without a term to express a demand in its proper sense. In like manner, "transaction," the French word for a compromise, is translated into the English word transaction; while, curiously enough, the inverse change is taking place in France, where the word "compromis" has lately begun to be used for expressing the same idea. If this continues, the two countries will have exchanged phrases.
Independently, however, of the generalization of names through their ignorant misuse, there is a tendency in the same direction consistently with a perfect knowledge of their meaning; arising from the fact, that the number of things known to us, and of which we feel a desire to speak, multiply faster than the names for them. Except on subjects for which there has been constructed a scientific terminology, with which unscientific persons do not meddle, great difficulty is generally found in bringing a new name into use; and independently of that difficulty, it is natural to prefer giving to a new object a name which at least expresses its resemblance to something already known, since by predicating of it a name entirely new we at first convey no information. In this manner the name of a species often becomes the name of a genus; as salt, for example, or oil; the former of which words originally denoted only the muriate of soda, the latter, as its etymology indicates, only olive-oil; but which now denote large and diversified classes of substances resembling these in some of their qualities, and connote only those common qualities, instead of the whole of the distinctive properties of olive-oil and sea-salt. The words glass and soap are used by modern chemists in a similar manner, to denote genera of which the substances vulgarly so called are single species. And it often happens, as in those instances, that the term keeps its special signification in addition to its more general one, and becomes ambiguous, that is, two names instead of one.
These changes, by which words in ordinary use become more and more generalized, and less and less expressive, take place in a still greater degree with the words which express the complicated phenomena of mind and society. Historians, travelers, and in general those who speak or write concerning moral and social phenomena with which they are not familiarly acquainted, are the great agents in this modification of language. The vocabulary of all except unusually instructed as well as thinking persons, is, on such subjects, eminently scanty. They have a certain small set of words to which they are accustomed, and which they employ to express phenomena the most heterogeneous, because they have never sufficiently analyzed the facts to which those words correspond in their own country, to have attached perfectly definite ideas to the words. The first English conquerors of Bengal, for example, carried with them the phrase _landed proprietor_ into a country where the rights of individuals over the soil were extremely different in degree, and even in nature, from those recognized in England. Applying the term with all its English associations in such a state of
