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 <)2 T. LE MAECHANT DOUSE : rents and fares over the counter, are a confusion of " cheap or dear goods " with " high or low fares or rents." A very important, or at any rate interesting, extension of " Contamination " appears in what is called " Popular Ety- mology " (see my Note in MIND, just referred to), which is almost exclusively characteristic of the illiterate. The "etymology," however, properly speaking, is only part of a compound phenomenon, the other part being a modification of the shape of difficult and unfamiliar words upon the pattern of easy and familiar ones. The typical but extreme instance is the once general "sparrow-grass" for " aspara- gus," where the whole word is transfigured, and made to carry a meaning on its very face. Temporary instances, peculiar to individuals, are not uncommon, but leaving these I pass on (if I may resume written examples) to notice two or three that were furnished by my examinees, and could hardly be brought under mere "misspellings." One candi- date, for example, among scientific inventions entered Acto- nometer (for Acti-), and then described it as " an instrument for measuring work," taking his mistaken form acto- as the stem of actum. Another derived the first part of tele- graph from reXo?, "end," supposing that tbe instrument " writes messages at the end of a wire " ! In two other in- stances there was a mental assimilation, as to meaning only, of parts of given words to more familiar factors, viz. : Prosody was twice defined as the art of writing Prose ; and in Homo- phone, homo- was thrice taken as the Latin homo, and the whole word was defined by the respective candidates as "speech of man," " a man who studies sounds," and "an instrument which imitates men's voices,"- meanings in- vented to suit the imagined derivations. The foregoing inquiries suggested the further question whether similar mistakes could be found in printed matter, or at any rate in well-printed matter. In advance, this seemed highly improbable, inasmuch as mistakes, whether of author or of compositor, undergo (or should undergo) the scrutiny of two or three pairs of eyes. Yet a few days' careful observation of such print as came before me showed that our categories of error, in spite of readings in proof, were also here fairly well represented, thanks, I believe, to the compositor. Thus, of instances falling under (1), I saw in a Literary Journal, "Yes, by boy" ; "Lady W plotted to deceiver her husband " ; in a work on Logic, " On exarni- nings those moods " ; in a History of Literature, " Cobbett was the son of a farmer-labourer"; in a recent reprint of