y "Sanctify this water
to the mystical washing away of sin." Mystical in this connection spells
magical, and we have no place for a god-magician: the prayer is to us
unmeaning, irreverent. Or again, after much toil we have ceased, or
hope we have ceased, to think anthropomorphically. Yet we are invited
to offer formal thanks to God for a meal of flesh whose sanctity is the
last survival of that sacrifice of bulls and goats he has renounced.
Such a ritual confuses our intellect and fails to stir our emotion. But
to others this ritual, magical or anthropomorphic as it is, is charged
with emotional impulse, and others, a still larger number, think that
they act by reason when really they are hypnotised by suggestion and
tradition; their fathers did this or that and at all costs they must do
it. It was good that primitive man in his youth should bear the yoke of
conservative custom; from each man's neck that yoke will fall, when and
because he has outgrown it. Science teaches us to await that moment with
her own inward and abiding patience. Such a patience, such a gentleness
we may well seek to practise in the spirit and in the memory of Darwin.

XXVI. EVOLUTION AND THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. By P. Giles, M.A., LL.D.
(Aberdeen),

Reader in Comparative Philology in the University of Cambridge.

In no study has the historical method had a more salutary influence
than in the Science of Language. Even the earliest records show that the
meaning of the names of persons, places, and common objects was then, as
it has always been since, a matter of interest to mankind. And in every
age the common man has regarded himself as competent without special
training to explain by inspection (if one may use a mathematical phrase)
the meaning of any words that attracted his attention. Out of this
amateur etymologising has sprung a great amount of false history, a kind
of historical mythology invented to explain familiar names. A single
example will illustrate the tendency. According to the local legend the
ancestor of the Earl of Erroll--a husbandman who stayed the flight of
his countrymen in the battle of Luncarty and won the victory over the
Danes by the help of the yoke of his oxen--exhausted with the fray
uttered the exclamation "Hoch heigh!" The grateful king about to ennoble
the victorious ploughman at once replied:

"Hoch heigh! said ye
And Hay shall ye be."

The Norman origin of the name Hay is well-known, and th