things; to one who had only a limited right they gave an absolute right, from another because he had not an absolute right they took away all right, drove whole classes of people to ruin and despair, filled the country with banditti, created a feeling that nothing was secure, and produced, with the best intentions, a disorganization of society which had not been produced in that country by the most ruthless of its barbarian invaders. Yet the usage of persons capable of so gross a misapprehension determines the meaning of language; and the words they thus misuse grow in generality, until the instructed are obliged to acquiesce; and to employ those words (first freeing them from vagueness by giving them a definite connotation) as generic terms, subdividing the genera into species.
§ 4. While the more rapid growth of ideas than of names thus creates a perpetual necessity for making the same names serve, even if imperfectly, on a greater number of occasions; a counter-operation is going on, by which names become on the contrary restricted to fewer occasions, by taking on, as it were, additional connotation, from circumstances not originally included in the meaning, but which have become connected with it in the mind by some accidental cause. We have seen above, in the words pagan and villain, remarkable examples of the specialization of the meaning of words from casual associations, as well as of the generalization of it in a new direction, which often follows.
Similar specializations are of frequent occurrence in the history even of scientific nomenclature. "It is by no means uncommon," says Dr. Paris, in his Pharmacologia,(221) "to find a word which is used to express general characters subsequently become the name of a specific substance in which such characters are predominant; and we shall find that some important anomalies in nomenclature may be thus explained. The term Αρσενίκον, from which the word Arsenic is derived, was an ancient epithet applied to those natural substances which possessed strong and acrimonious properties; and as the poisonous quality of arsenic was found to be remarkably powerful, the term was especially applied to Orpiment, the form in which this metal most usually occurred. So the term Verbena (quasi Herbena) originally denoted all those herbs that were held sacred on account of their being employed in the rites of sacrifice, as we learn from the poets; but as one herb was usually adopted upon these occasions, the word Verbena came to denote that particular herb only, and it is transmitted to us to this day under the same title, viz., Verbena or Vervain, and indeed until lately it enjoyed the medical reputation which its sacred origin conferred upon it, for it was worn suspended around the neck as an amulet. Vitriol, in the original application of the word, denoted any crystalline body with a certain degree of transparency (vitrum); it is hardly necessary to observe that the term is now appropriated to a particular species: in the same manner, Bark, which is a general term, is applied to express one genus, and by way of eminence it has the article The prefixed, as The bark; the same observation will apply to the word Opium, which, in its primitive sense, signifies any juice (ὀπὸς, Succus), while it now only denotes one species, viz., that of the poppy. So, again, Elaterium was used by Hippocrates to signify various internal applications, especially purgatives, of a violent and drastic nature (from the word ἐλαύνω, agito, moveo, stimulo), but by succeeding authors it was exclusively applied to denote the active matter which subsides
