s of each of these lives. It cannot then be
superfluous to direct attention to that which is actually going forward
in our language. It is indeed that, which of all is most likely to be
unobserved by us.

* * * * *

With these preliminary remarks I proceed at once to the special subject
of my lecture of to-day. And first, starting from the recognized fact
that the English is not a simple but a composite language, made up of
several elements, as are the people who speak it, I would suggest to you
the profit and instruction which we might derive from seeking to
resolve it into its component parts--from taking, that is, any passage
of an English author, distributing the words of which it is made up
according to the languages from which they are drawn; estimating the
relative numbers and proportions, which these languages have severally
lent us; as well as the character of the words which they have thrown
into the common stock of our tongue.

{Sidenote: _Proportions in English_}

Thus, suppose the English language to be divided into a hundred parts;
of these, to make a rough distribution, sixty would be Saxon; thirty
would be Latin (including of course the Latin which has come to us
through the French); five would be Greek. We should thus have assigned
ninety-five parts, leaving the other five, perhaps too large a residue,
to be divided among all the other languages from which we have adopted
isolated words{3}. And yet these are not few; from our wide extended
colonial empire we come in contact with half the world; we have picked
up words in every quarter, and, the English language possessing a
singular power of incorporating foreign elements into itself, have not
scrupled to make many of these our own{4}.

{Sidenote: _Oriental Words_}

Thus we have a certain number of Hebrew words, mostly, if not entirely,
belonging to religious matters, as 'amen', 'cabala', 'cherub', 'ephod',
'gehenna', 'hallelujah', 'hosanna', 'jubilee', 'leviathan', 'manna',
'Messiah', 'sabbath', 'Satan', 'seraph', 'shibboleth', 'talmud'. The
Arabic words in our language are more numerous; we have several
arithmetical and astronomical terms, as 'algebra', 'almanack',
'azimuth', 'cypher'{5}, 'nadir', 'talisman', 'zenith', 'zero'; and
chemical, for the Arabs were the chemists, no less than the astronomers
and arithmeticians of the middle ages; as 'alcohol', 'alembic',
'alkali', 'elixir'. Add to these the names of anim