“padding.” Professor Whitney had read my own Lectures before writing his; and though he is quite right in saying the principal facts on which his reasonings are founded have been for some time past the commonplaces of Comparative Philology, and required no acknowledgment, he makes an honorable exception in my favor, and acknowledges most readily having borrowed here and there an illustration from my Lectures. As to my own views on the Science of Language, I am glad to find that on all really important points, he far more frequently indorses them--nay, corroborates them by new proofs and illustrations--than attempts to refute them; and even in the latter case he generally does so by simply pronouncing his decided preference for one out of two opinions, while I had been satisfied with stating what could be said on either side. He might here and there have tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, but I believe there is far more license allowed in America, in the expression of dissent, than in England; and it is both interesting and instructive in the study of Dialectic Growth, to see how words which would be considered offensive in England, have ceased to be so on the other side of the Atlantic, and are admitted into the most respectable of American Reviews. With regard to the question, for instance, on which so much has lately been written, whether we ought to ascribe to language a natural growth or historical change, I see not one single argument produced on either side of the question in Professor Whitney’s Second Lecture, beyond those which I had discussed in my Second Lecture. After stating all that could be said in support of extending the name of history to the gradual development of language, I tried to show that, after all, that name would not be quite accurate. “The process,” I said, “through which language is settled and unsettled combines in one the two opposite elements of necessity and free will. Though the individual seems to be the prime agent in producing new words and new grammatical forms, he is so only after his individuality has been merged in the common action of the family, tribe, or nation to which he belongs. He can do nothing by himself, and the first impulse to a new formation in language, though given by an individual, is mostly, if not always, given without premeditation, nay, unconsciously. The individual, as such, is powerless, and the results, apparently produced by him, depend on laws beyond his control, and on the coöperation of all those who form together with him one class, one body, one organic whole.” (Page 43.) After going through the whole argument, I summed up in the end by saying:--