Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/229

 ress in the arts, is indicated by such words as axle, yoke, wheel, nave, wain or wagon, ore (copper), row, rudder (paddle), door, timber, thatch, mead, weave; and their knowledge, their powers of observation, are shown by such words as tree, birch, withy, wolf, feather, nest, otter, beaver, hare, mouse, night, dew, star, snow, wind, fire, east, thunder, etc.;—all primitive terms, or those derived from early roots.

These and scores of other words tell us much of that prehistoric experience in which many elements of our own modern civilization had their origin. More than that, they show our spiritual kinship with peoples widely distributed over the continents of earth and with others across oceans of time. They keep the ghosts of the dim past before our eyes; they have borne across the centuries some of our simplest, finest, most poetic, and most purely religious conceptions; also they have preserved strange superstitions and the rites that still fascinate us, although we no longer know their meanings. Words of our vocabulary