Page:Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, Volume 3 (1797).djvu/115

Rh Varro. 'We shall therefore hazard the use of new words when necessary, and by your authority.'

And where the same necessity, arising from the same source, exists, the same liberty is to be taken. And as Cicero, on this point, is an unexceptionable authority, let us examine his practice, to see to what degree it may be carried. The word Qualitas, derived from Quale, is now familiarized to the ear. The first boldness of this derivative is only perceived by reflection; but its degree will strike us more immediately, if we take the English words what, or such (as), which answer to the Latin pronominal adjective Quale, and add one of the substantive terminations [hood] or [ness] to either, to make a philosophical term of it. I ask the severe grammarians, who protest against the class of new derivatives in the philosophical language of Linnæus, to produce among them a bolder example of the creation of a new term.

And by the same authority, we may defend his imposing new significations on old words; for in a few lines after the conclusion of the extract, there occurs a liberty of this kind, and as remarkable as the former; for Cicero there gives a new sense to the pronominal adjective Quale, in correspondence to that of his new derivative Qualitas; using it substantively to signify any being or thing, as compounded of substance and accident, or matter and qualities: "Et ita effeci quæ appellant qualia; e quibus in omni natura cohærente, ct continuata cum omnibus fuis partibus, effectum esse mundum."

It deserves to be remarked respecting these innovations, that this assertion of the legitimacy of the practice in all like cases is here put by Cicero into the mouth of Varro, the greatest critic and grammarian of the Augustan age; who wrote on the Latin language, and addressed his works to Cicero himself.

Vol. III.