Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/269

VI.] of correspondences which lie out of the reach of careless and uninstructed eyes, rejection of deceptive resemblances which have no historical foundation—these are the most important part of the linguistic student's work. Surface collation without genetic analysis, as far-reaching as the attainable evidence allows, is but a travesty of the methods of comparative philology.

Another not infrequent misapprehension of etymologic study consists in limiting its sphere of action to a tracing out of the correspondences of words. This is, indeed, as we have called it, the fundamental stage, on the solidity of which depends the security of all the rest of the structure; but it is only that. Comparative etymology, like chemistry, runs into an infinity of detail, in which the mind of the student is sometimes entangled, and his effort engrossed; it has its special rules and methods, which admit within certain limits of being mechanically applied, by one ignorant or heedless of their true ground and meaning. Many a man is a skilful and successful hunter of verbal connections whose views of linguistic science are of the crudest and most imperfect character. Not only does he thus miss what ought to be his highest reward, the recognition of those wide relations and great truths to which his study of words should conduct him, but his whole work lacks its proper basis, and is liable to prove weak at any point. The history of words is inextricably bound up with that of human thought and life and action, and cannot be read without it. We fully understand no word till we comprehend the motives and conditions that called it forth and determined its form. The word money, for example, is not explained when we have marshalled the whole array of its correspondents in all European tongues, and traced them up to their source in the Latin moneta: all the historical circumstances which have caused a term once limited to an obscure city to be current now in the mouths of such immense communities; the wants and devices of civilization and commerce which have created the thing designated by the word and made it what it is; the outward circumstances and mental associations which, by successive changes, have worked out the name from a root