on any otherwise explicable
structure or faculty. It is of no use to determine, by microscope or
retort, that cinnamon is made of cells with so many walls, or grape-juice
of molecules with so many sides;--we are just as far as ever from
understanding why these particular interstices should be aromatic, and
these special parallelopipeds exhilarating, as we were in the savagely
unscientific days when we could only see with our eyes, and smell with our
noses. But to call each of these separate substances by a name rightly
belonging to it through all the past variations of the language of educated
man, will probably enable us often to discern powers in the thing itself,
of affecting the human body and mind, which are indeed qualities infinitely
more its _own_, than any which can possibly be extracted by the point of a
knife, or brayed out with a mortar and pestle.

7. Thus, to take merely instance in the three main elements of which we
have just determined the names,--flour, oil, and ambrosia;--the differences
in the kinds of pleasure which the tongue received from the powderiness of
oat-cake, or a well-boiled potato--(in the days when oat-cake and potatoes
were!)--from the glossily-softened crispness of a well-made salad, and from
the cool and fragrant amber of an apricot, are indeed distinctions between
the essential virtues of things which {232} were made to be _tasted_, much
more than to be eaten; and in their various methods of ministry to, and
temptation of, human appetites, have their part in the history, not of
elements merely, but of souls; and of the soul-virtues, which from the
beginning of the world have bade the barrel of meal not waste, nor the
cruse of oil fail; and have planted, by waters of comfort, the fruits which
are for the healing of nations.

8. And, again, therefore, I must repeat, with insistance, the claim I have
made for the limitation of language to the use made of it by educated men.
The word 'carp' could never have multiplied itself into the absurdities of
endo-carps and epi-carps, but in the mouths of men who scarcely ever read
it in its original letters, and therefore never recognized it as meaning
precisely the same thing as 'fructus,' which word, being a little more
familiar with, they would have scarcely abused to the same extent; they
would not have called a walnut shell an intra-fruct--or a grape skin an
extra-fruct; but again, because, though they are accustomed to the English
'fructif