there is very little four-year-old mutton, there
is more good food, and probably ten times as
much mutton, as in Bakewell's time. The legs
are longer and rounder, the backs are flatter,
and the ribs more hoop-like. The shoulders,
too, have gained, while as to maturity, which
means increased number of pounds of legs, loins,
chops, and shoulders turned off a farm in a year,
let one of the greatest salesmen in the London
market speak:

"Twenty years ago I was sent to the
London market to buy a lot of sheep to graze,
and was told to be sure to get a few shearlings,
or one-year-old sheep; but I could
find none less than two, three, or four years old.
Now, you may go through the sheep market and
not find twenty per cent over one year old,
two per cent over two years old; and three-year-
old sheep are almost unknown in the London
live market." This really means that a farm
feeds three or four times as many sheep on the
same land in four years, as before Bakewell's
principles became, with the assistance of corn
and oil-cake, guano-grown roots, and clay
drainage, almost universal. With a moderate
unlimited pasture, and time no object, it is very
easy to produce excellent mutton, as good as on
the best and highest farmed estate of 1859.
But, our breeders and farmers, with the assistance
of engineers, chemists, and merchants, have
found out how to increase the supplies of mutton
a hundred-fold without increasing the area
of our island.

We have said nothing of Ireland, because
Ireland does not shine in sheep, but in Short-
horns. The climate of Ireland best suits English
long wool. There are no native Irish breeds.

TWISTED WORDS.

THE Dean of Westminster knows better than
any man in England how to teach his countrymen,
that it is pleasant work to look below the
surface of their language. To his delightful
little book upon " The Study of Words," and
upon " English Past and Present," Dr. Trench
has lately joined a companion volume called " A
Select Glossary of English Words, used formerly
in Senses Different from their Present." It is
illustrated from his own reading among early
English authors, and is not less remarkable for
independent scholarship than for simplicity. We
see in it wherein we may gather a small
etymological posy, and find satisfactory amusement.
Let us mean by Amusement what our forefathers
meant; something to muse over, something that
seizes the attention. To a certain limited extent,
that sense remains. For example, we may say
that a thief keeps a man amused with empty
questions, while he takes his watch. But we
should not now say of a man, as Fuller did, that
"being amused with grief, fear and fright, he
could not find a house in London (otherwise well
known to him), whither he intended to go."
In. the word Amusement, then, we do not quite
abandon the idea of occupation of the mind.

Abandon, banish, give to the bann or open
proclamation, which was commonly a
condemnation to the penalty of law, but not
necessarily so. When we publish the banns or
proclaimings of marriage, we are not supposed to
mean a condemnation of the bachelors and
spinsters to some legal pains. A bandit—ban-
spoken— is a man against whom law has
proclaimed itself. A house is in the fullest sense
abandoned, when its owner has not only left it,
but has also put it into the hands of an auctioneer,
who advertises that it will be sold to the best
bidder; or when it is left to fall under the ban
of a Public Health Act, and be pulled down by
a Board of Works. To denounce, or leave to
be denounced, was to abandon, the sense of the
word corresponding fully in old time to its
internal Anatomy.

Anatomy is Greek for dissection, and means
only the cutting asunder the several parts of a
thing. After all this dissection of a man was
done, the bones remained, and thus what we
now call the skeleton (from the Greek word for
dry) used to be called the anatomy. A skeleton,
on the contrary meant, not the bones only, but
the entire body dried into a mummy, though no
bones whatever were apparent.

The word apparent is here used in the old
sense of manifest, though Dr. Trench tells us
that the one phrase " heir apparent" is the only
instance of our use of the word as meaning that
which appears and is, in opposition to its present
customary sense of that which appears but is
not. We suggest as a question, whether there
may not be a slight tendency to use this word in
one sense as an adjective before its noun, and in
the other sense when it is the noun that is first
spoken or written. The heir apparent is not
the same thing as the apparent heir. Does not
a like distinction hold good rather generally?
Between such phrases, for example, as apparent
anger in his letter and anger apparent in his
letter?

Here let us diverge to make a grammatical
remark. There is a curious instinct about
common usage. Everybody knows that there
are verbs—like swim, and sink—that represent
the past with two forms. Swim makes swam and
swum; sink makes sank and sunk. The double
form arose from a fact wholly dead to the existing
language. In the oldest English, one vowel
was used in the singular, and the other in the
plural, of the perfect tense; it was (to speak
rough) I sank, but we sunk. Both forms,
disengaged from their first tie, were at one time left
to drift loosely about in the language, and
grammarians now teach that one is doomed to be got
rid of. Probably not. Without accepting rule
from anybody, by mere consent and usage of all
educated English speakers, the loose fragments
have crystallised afresh into a fixed shape that
has no reference whatever to their first position.
The forms in a are confined to the active past
tense, and the forms in u are all changed into
participles. We say I drank and I was drunk,
never I drunk and I was drank. We speak of
money sunk, not money sank. It is no longer