syllables called roots, or radicals; and those
who trace them to four hundred and sixty odd,
laugh at the reasoners who trace them up to
fewer, and especially the rather too ingenious
gentleman who reduces them to one. This may,
after all, be only the reduction of their own idea
to an absurdity.

The writer studies words, not in search of
roots, but to hunt up old pictures. Words do
not grow from roots, and they are not nourished
from roots, like plants. When we come to a
picture of the past, we are satisfied. The other
day, for instance, meeting a friend whose name is
Townsend, we asked him whether he spelt his
name with an h or not, and why he omitted the
h? The substance of his reply was that the
aspirate made no difference: " shend," in the
old English of Spenser and Fairfax, meaning a
spoiler, destroyer, or sacker; and a Townsend or
Townshend being a town-sacker, a name of
distinction among the Saxons as it was among the
ancient Greeks. Here is a picture in this
derivation, of the fierce spirit which once reigned in
England.

The words Scots and Picts again carry us
back to the period when the British islands
were peopled. The letter p often changing
into f, and ct into xt or ght, a Pict is simply
a fixt man. The folks who settled down in a
place, were the Picts; and the Scots were the
folks who did not settle down. A shot is
something thrust out. A scot was an outcast man,
as a shout is an outcast sound. The sum paid
for an entertainment is still called a shot, as
it was when Shakespeare wrote in the Two
Gentlemen of Verona:

For one shot tliou shalt have two thousand welcomes.

Paying scot and lot was paying what you were
expected to pay and allotted to pay. Shotfree
is still often pronounced scot-free, meaning
payment free. The Saxon verb is scitan,
to shoot or eject. A skater casts out his feet,
and a horse doing the same is skittish (not
Scottish). The Picts were the tribes who
sought their living by building towns near the
mouths of rivers, tilling the land and catching
the fish; the Scots pursued the course of the
mountain ranges.

What a wild light is thrown upon the minds
and manners of our Saxon and Scandinavian
forefathers, by the pictures which are discoverable
from tracing the derivations of the words
"will" and "shall!" As everybody knows,
Irishmen and Scotchmen misunderstand the
distinction between these words, characteristically,
in different ways; and Frenchmen have no
means of expressing these widely different
meanings of the future tense. Scotch boys
are all taught at school, a rhymed rule of
grammar, which is supposed to make the
difference between will and shall, clear to every
boy who is not a dunce; but Sir Walter Scott
declared frankly that he never could understand
the rule, and that he found the distinction quite
beyond his comprehension. If the word-lore of
the present day had been known to him, his
imagination would, we doubt not, have realised
the difference without ever afterwards forgetting
it.  A future action may be viewed either as an
occurrence, an intention, or a necessity.  The
learned Grimme proved that "shall" is derived
from "skalan", the Scandinavian word for the
pain of death, the source both of our word
"shall" and out word "kill."  The predominant
idea in the word shall, is the notion of doom.
Shall is Destiny in the shape of an auxiliary
verb. When choosing a term to express the
inevitable future, the founders of the English
language chose a term the most expressive
possible of a fatal, unmistakable, and inevitable
future.  As shall contiains the idea of doom,
will conveys the notion of choice.  The word
"wale" means in the English language a rising
part upon a cloth, or skin—as when it is said that
the lash wales the soldier's back; and yet the
heart of the Scotchman is full of gentleness
when he says he intends "to wale a wife."
Such a waling being the highest compliment
he can pay her sex.  The derivation of the word
makes it curious and strange enough that ever
a term so stern should have come to be
employed to describe an errand so gentle.  The
Saxon word willan signifies to spring out, to
well.  An old poet says:

Thereby a chrystall stream did gently play,
Which from a sacred fountain welled alway.

From expressing vhat " springs out" the word
came to express what is chosen, or picked out.

From Thor, the god of the air, we get the
word thunder. Ridicule, which is not a sign of
strength when employed in scientific discussions,
has been recently thrown upon the opinion that
words are derived from the sounds of nature;
and it has been called the bow-wow theory and
the pooh-pooh! theory; and the origin of words
has been ascribed to a mental instinct of
primeval man which has been lost from disuse.
It is, we are told, mere imagination that a
rolling and rumbling noise is to be heard in
the word " thunder," such as the old Germans
ascribed to their god Thor, when playing at
ninepins. Thunder, it is argued, is clearly the
same word as the Latin tonitru, the root of
which is tan, to stretch, whence we have through
the Greek tonos our word tone, tone being
produced by the stretching and vibrating of cords.
But it seems to us that the sound of thunder is
very badly described as a rumbling noise, and
that tanyu, tanyatu, and tanayitnu, the Sanscrit
for thundering, is far from being a bad or
unsuggestive verbal imitation of thunder-claps
and rattling peals. The stretching of cords
names itself when it cries twang or tan; and it
is not an argument of any weight against this
view that from tan or stretching also comes the
Latin " tener," the French and English tender
and tendre, and even the English word thin. If
it be mere imagination that there is vocal
imitation in thunder, tonitru, and tanayitnu, we
must assume that there is no imitation in the
Red Indian's name for thunder—baimwawa.

The dog, we are told, does not bark "bow-
wow." No naturalist says it does: bow-wow