il before it was given to a mast.
Although the Italian word means "middle," it is perhaps, in this
particular sense, a popular corruption of an Arabic word of quite
different meaning. The discussion of so difficult a problem is rather
out of place in a book intended for the general reader, but I cannot
refrain from giving a most interesting note which I owe to Mr W. B.
Whall, Master Mariner, the author of _Shakespeare's Sea Terms
Explained_--"The sail was (until c. 1780) lateen, _i.e._, triangular,
like the sail of a galley. The Saracens, or Moors, were the great galley
sailors of the Mediterranean, and _mizen_ comes from Arab., _miezen_,
balance. The _mizen_ is, even now, a sail that 'balances,' and the reef
in a mizen is still called the 'balance' reef."

[11] "I have _endeavoured_ to moderate his tyrannical choler"
(Urquhart's Translation, 1653).

[12] The credit of first using the word in the political sense is
claimed both for George Jacob Holyoake and Professor Minto.

[13] From Anglo-Sax. _m[=a]n_, deceit, cognate with the first syllable
of Ger. _Meineid_, perjury.

[14] This word, which looks like an unsuccessful palindrome, belongs to
the language of medieval magic. It seems to be artificially elaborated
from {abraxas}, a word of Persian origin used by a sect of Greek
gnostics. Its letters make up the magic number 365, supposed to
represent the number of spirits subject to the supreme being.

[15] In coining _vril_ Lytton probably had in mind Lat. _vis_, _vires_,
power, or the adjective _virilis_.

CHAPTER II

WANDERINGS OF WORDS

In assigning to a word a foreign origin, it is necessary to show how
contact between the two languages has taken place, or the particular
reasons which have brought about the borrowing. A Chinese word cannot
suddenly make its appearance in Anglo-Saxon, though it may quite well do
so in modern English. No nautical terms have reached us from the coast
of Bohemia (_Winter's Tale_, iii. 3), nor is the vocabulary of the wine
trade enriched by Icelandic words. Although we have words from all the
languages of Europe, our direct borrowings from some of them have been
small. The majority of High German words in English have passed through
Old French, and we have taken little from modern German. On the other
hand, commerce has introduced a great many words from the old Low German
dialects of the North Sea and the Baltic.

The Dutch[16] element in English supplies a useful obj