we say a tree, and the tree. A proper noun is a noun which is proper or peculiar (proprium, Lat. peculiar) to an individual, as to a person, a place, a city, a nation. Thus Alfred is a proper noun; so is Lancashire, and London, and England.

The distinction between common and proper is not very satisfactory. If tree is a common noun because the term tree is common to all trees, might not George be accounted a common noun because it is common to all the Georges? And is not the name Tree as peculiar to the class Tree, as the name George is peculiar to the class of persons who bear this name? If, then, Tree is a noun peculiar to an individual and a class, and if George is the same, the distinction between common and proper does not appear determinate. In truth, the terms peculiar and common do not here essentially differ, for what is peculiar to each of a class, is common to all the members of that class.

The difficulty seems to arise from the multiplication of the objects which are considered as nouns proper. So long as there is but one London, the word London is strictly a proper or peculiar name. But let there be several cities so called, then a class is formed, and the original peculiarity is lost. What was once peculiar to an individual place, is now common to several places. Proper names, you thus see, pass into common names.

This want of fixedness and precision is an objection. Nevertheless, the classification of nouns as nouns common and nouns proper has so rooted itself in our grammar, that I think it better to retain it, than to propose another which might be scarcely free from exception.

Emerson has written a book on what he calls "Representative Men." There are also representative nouns or names. Thus Solomon stands for a wise man, Cræsus for a rich man, Judas for a traitor, Demosthenes for an orator, Cicero for the same, and Homer for a poet. Now mark how these are constructed. Shylock exclaims

"A Daniel come to judgment! Yea, a Daniel.”

And we also say of an eminent orator, "he is the Cicero of his age." Daniel and Cicero, in themselves, are proper nouns. la virtue of the articles they become common.

As proper nouns become common, so common nouns become proper, under the influence of the article. In the latter case,

however, it is the definite article which produces the effect. A Strand is a river's bank. The Strand is a thoroughfare in London, so called because it runs alongside the Thames. So we speak of the Channel, the Downs, the United States, the Netherlands. We also say the Harbour; but the Harbour is not a proper name, except at Portsmouth, where the Harbour means the particular harbour that is there; but the usage is local; whereas it requires national usage to convert such a common noun into a proper noun. This fact is exemplified in the phrase the Lakes, which from national usage means the Lakes of Westmoreland. The Lakes, therefore, has become the specific name for the whole district in

the North of England where certain lakes are found. After a similar manner we speak of the Highlands.

The figure termed Personification (ascribing personal qualities to inanimate objects) may give to a common noun the attributes of a proper noun. "Reason is the highest gift of God; may we, O Divine Reason, listen reverently to thy voice!" In the first member or part of the sentence, reason is a common noun; in the second, in consequence of being the object of a direct address, it is a proper noun.

We have already seen that common nouns may represent an individual or a class. Thus a pigeon is one bird, but the pigeon is the class of birds so denominated. Some common nouns in their essential import denote a number; such as a fleet, a navy, a flock. These nouns are called collective, or nouns of multitude. Singular in form, they are plural in import. Indeed, they denote a class. Thus a crowd is a number of individuals considered as forming one body; a council is a number of men met for consultation, forming the class councillor, in relation to some particular ocality. Thus we say, I am in the council; I am of the council; hat is, I am one of the class or body known under that general

.erm.

Proper nouns may be distinguished as names of places and names of persons. Names of places were originally descriptive; they described the places to which they were assigned. The Bible furnishes such names in abundance; for instance, a place in the Wilderness of Sinai was denominated Kibroth Hattaavah, that is, graves of lust, from an historical event recorded in the book of Numbers xi. 34. Names of places have, to the unlearned, ceased to be descriptive, because the terms have lost their meaning. Those who would know the meaning of the names in English topography must study the Teutonic and the Celtic languages, which contain the original elements out of which those names were formed. Some instances have been given-I add two or three. Orc, the name given to the Orkney islands in the Welsh Triads, signifies that which is extreme, so that Orkney is the extreme or last country, the ultima Thule. Ramsgate means the gate or pass leading into Ram, or Ruim, the British name for the Isle of Thanet. Canterbury is a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon Cantwara byrig, the forts or strongholds of the Cantware, that is, the men of Kent. Cant itself comes from Caint, which, in Welsh, means a plain or open country; and it was probably the old Welsh name for the slip of open land lying between the Weald and the Thames. The word Winchester is a hybrid, that is a cross between the British and the Latin. Chester is the Latin Castra, a camp, and denotes a Roman station. It is frequent in our names of places; e. g. Manchester, Dorchester, Chester. The first syllable Win is the Welsh Gwent, which like Caint (probably the same word) signifies an open country. It seems to have been a name given to several districts in this island. Monmouthshire is still called Gwent by the Welsh, and was called Went by our English chroniclers as late as the 10th century. The

K

Welsh name Gwent was softened by the Anglo-Saxons into Winte whence came Winceaster, that is Winchester.*

Names of places, as being proper nouns, are distinctive as well as descriptive. Thus Paris is the capital of the French empire But is there another Paris in the world? Our North American brothers have unsparingly given the names belonging to the old country, to places of recent foundation in the new country. In so doing they have caused many of our names of places to lose their distinctiveness. The name Boston once denoted the town in Lincolnshire so called. The name was distinctive. Another Boston has sprung up in Massachusetts. Now, then, when we use the term, we are obliged to add some distinctive epithet, and call the one Boston in England, and the other Boston in the United States. Unless such an epithet is added, confusion must ensue. I have known a letter travel over a large part of England in search of the right Broughton, where lived the person for whom it was intended.

I subjoin some examples of the meaning of names of places in England.

Names of towns ending in mouth and ford.-Instances: Plymouth, Tynemouth, Yarmouth, Portsmouth; Oxford, Stratford, Romford, Salford.

The ending mouth denotes the mouth of a river, or the point where a river falls into the sea; thus Tynemouth is the mouth of the river Tyne. Portsmouth, the mouth of the Port, originally denoted the projecting land forming the narrow opening by which ships pass from the sea (Spithead) into the harbour. Ford, the German furt, signifies the part of a river or stream which, from its being shallow, may be forded, or passed dry-foot.

Names of towns ending in chester, caster, ċester.-Instances: Dorchester, Porchester, Lancaster, Doncaster, Gloucester, Worcester, Leicester, Cirencester.

These endings come from either the Roman castra or the Saxon caester, according as the one or the other may be considered as the original word; not improbably the Saxon caester is a derivative from the Latin castra or castrum. Castrum in Latin, as caester in Saxon, denotes a fort, a fortification, a castle, an encampment; hence a military settlement, and so a town or city; for many of our towns were at the first military settlements.

Names of towns and villages in wich or wick.-Instances: Greenwich, Woolwich, Harwich, Norwich, Nantwich, Berwick, Keswick,

Wich or wick denotes an inlet or creek formed by the bend of a river; then the land so enclosed, and then the collection of abodes fixed there; and so a fortification, a village, or town.

The ending shire.-Instances: Yorkshire, Cardiganshire, Devonshire, Lancashire, Cheshire.

Shire, connected with the German scheren (Saxon, scir), to cut, to cut off, to divide, denotes a division of a country, a large dis

See Proceedings of Philological Society, vol. 1. p. 9, &c.

trict; thus, Yorkshire is the district which belongs to the city of York, and of which that city is the (provincial) capital.

The ending sex.-Instances: Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, Wessex.

Sex is the remainder of the old, Saxon term Seaxe, Saxe (German, Sachse), signifying Saxons; so that Sussex means the south Saxons, &c.

The endings borough, burg (German burg, a castle), bury.-Instances: Peterborough, Queensborough, Edinburgh, Sudbury, Bury.

Borough, softened into burg and bury, is the German burg (Greek, purg), a fortified place, a town; borough, considered as a municipality, is a derived and comparatively recent application. Burg or Bury also signifies a bosom, that is, a vale environed with hills; hence the use of the word in relation to places situated as is Bury in Lancashire.

The ending or prefix Ham.-Instances: Higham, Hampstead, Hampton, Oakham.

Ham, still continued as a separate word in the diminutive hamlet, denotes a dwelling, and hence à village.

The ending minster.-Instances: Westminster, Exminster, Warminster.

Minster is a Saxon word signifying a monastery or settlement of monks; hence its application to some of our cathedrals, as the York Minster.

COMPOSITION.

Study, and, as well as you can, reproduce the following observations; and while you employ them as an exercise in composition, "mark, learn, and inwardly digest," so as to observe and follow their practical wisdom.

THE EXERCISE OF THOUGHT.

A little hard thinking will supply the place of a great deal of reading, and an hour or two spent in this manner sometimes lead you to conclusions which it would require a volume to establish. The mind advances in its train of thought, as a restive colt proceeds on the road in which you wish to guide him; he is always running to one side or the other, and deviating from the proper path, to which it is your affair to bring him back.

I have asked several men what passes in their minds when they are thinking; and I never could find any man who could think for two minutes together. Everybody has seemed to admit that it was a perpetual deviation from a particular path, and a perpetual return to it; which, imperfect as the operation is, is the only method in which we can operate with our minds to carry on any process of thought. It takes some time to throw the mind into an attitude of thought, or into any attitude; though the power of doing this, and in general of thinking, is amazingly increased by habit. We acquire, at length, a greater command over our associations, and are better enabled to pursue one object, unmoved by all the other thoughts which cross it in every direction.-Sydney Smith.

THE FOLLY OF UNIVERSAL ACQUIREMENTS.

There is another foppery which is to be cautiously guarded

against the foppery of universality,-of knowing all sciences and excelling in all arts,-chemistry, mathematics, algebra, dancing, history, reasoning, riding, fencing, Low Dutch, High_Dutch, natural philosophy, and enough of Spanish to talk about Lope de Vega: in short, the modern precept of education very often is, "Take the admirable Crichton for your model; I would have you ignorant of nothing!" Now my advice, on the contrary, is, to have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything. I would exact of a young man a pledge that he would never read Lope de Vega; he should pawn to me his honour to abstain from Bettinelli, and his thirty-five original sonneteers; and I would exact from him the most rigid securities that I was never to hear anything about that race of puny poets who lived in the reigns of Cosmo and Lorenzo di Medici.-Sydney Smith.

NAMES OF PERSONS.

NAMES of persons were originally descriptive; they had each a meaning, and that meaning set forth some individual peculiarity; something in the make, the form, the character, the history of the person to whom the name was given. Thus the first man was called Adam (in Hebrew, red earth) because he was formed out of the earth. And Adam called his wife woman, because she was the counterpart of man. In the Hebrew original the correspondence is well marked; woman is there called isha because she was taken out of ish, the former being the feminine form of the masculine noun ish, man. The derivation of woman has been disputed. Woman seems to be womb man; womb, denoting the feminine gender. Womb has been compared with the German weib, which is found in our wife. It is not unlikely that all these forms, namely wife, weib, womb, wo (man) are tracible to the phuo, fu of the Greeks, which is found in the fui (I was) of the Latins, and in their femina, a female. This view makes woman equivalent to wifeman, and so brings the English into a near resemblance to the Hebrew. The o in woman is no obstacle. In the plural the o becomes e or i in pronounciation. So was it written of old, e. g.,

"And the noumbre of men that eaten was fyve thousynd of men, out taken wymmen and litel children."-Wiclif, Matthew xiv. "And they that ate were in nombre aboute v. m. (five thousand) men, bcsyde wemen and children."—Bible, 1551, ib.

Richardson, however, in his "New English Dictionary," gives another view, which, though not approving it, I subjoin. "Woman a. s. (Anglo-Saxon) wife-man; man is a general term to include each sex (this is right), and the specific name wife-man is given to the female from her employment at the woof; and waepman to the male from his occupation in weapons of war.'

It is completely in unison with primaeval custom, that Adam is represented as changing his wife's name from woman to Eve (life) when she became a mother (Gen. iii. 20.)

In Anglo-Saxon, also, names of person had in each case a suitable signification. Thus our word Alfred means all-peace. I add