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408 nearly bare this phrase is of all indication of relations between the principal ideas, how ambiguous it is, but for the tone, the connection, the circumstances in which it is used, was pointed out before. If I say "fish, like water-rats, swim in rivers," or "fish-like water-snakes abound here," I have variously changed the elements of thought which these words indicate, without any corresponding change of their form. Were I, now, an ancient Roman, the words in which I should have put my first thought would be pisces amant aquam. Here, not only are the signs totally different, but a host of things are distinctly expressed which before were left to be inferred from the sum and surroundings of the statement. Pisces is marked not only as being a noun and nothing else, but a noun in a certain case of the plural number; amant is not less clearly a verb, and to be made nowhere but in the third person plural of the present indicative active; while aquam shows by its form that it is used as the direct object of the preceding verb, and that in all connections it is to be treated as a feminine word. If, again, I were a Frenchman, I should have said, les poissons aiment l'eau, literally, 'the fishes love the water.' Here nearly all the expressions of relation which the Latin words conveyed are lost again; in part, they are left to inference, as in English; in part, they are intimated by the two independent relational words, articles; which, moreover, point out a new relation, that of class (fish in general, not some fish only), not hinted at in either of the other phrases. The Chinese would embody the same sense in still other words, which would be even more barren than our English of any indication of relations except such as is signified by the respective position of the words and the requirements of the situation. Other languages, in expressing the same idea, would indicate yet other distinctions and relations: one, perhaps, has a different word for fish when living from that which denotes them when dead, or prepared for eating; another signifies the fondness which fish have for their native element by one term, and the higher affections of more rational beings by another; and so on. There is thus a very considerable discordance between the various equivalent