[Footnote 31: Sthâ, svâbhiprâyabodhanânukûlasthiti, to reveal by gestures, a meaning not found in our dictionaries. Wilson renders it wrongly by to stay with, which would govern the instrumental. +Śap+, cursing, means to use curses in order to convey some meaning or intention to another person.] [Footnote 32: Wilson’s _Sanskrit Grammar_, p. 390.] [Footnote 33: In verbs compounded with prepositions the accent is on the penultimate: _e.g._, +samídhe+, +atikráme+, etc.] [Footnote 34: See M. M.’s _Translation of the Rig-Veda_, I. p. 34.] [Footnote 35: Morris, _Historic Outlines of English Accidence_, p. 52.] [Footnote 36: Morris, l.c. p. 177.] II. REDE LECTURE, DELIVERED IN THE SENATE HOUSE BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, ON FRIDAY, MAY 29, 1868.[1] Part I. ON THE STRATIFICATION OF LANGUAGE. There are few sensations more pleasant than that of wondering. We have all experienced it in childhood, in youth, and in our manhood, and we may hope that even in our old age this affection of the mind will not entirely pass away. If we analyze this feeling of wonder carefully, we shall find that it consists of two elements. What we mean by wondering is not only that we are startled or stunned,--that I should call the merely passive element of wonder. When we say “I wonder,” we confess that we are taken aback, but there is a secret satisfaction mixed up with our feeling of surprise, a kind of hope, nay, almost of certainty, that sooner or later the wonder will cease, that our senses or our mind will recover, will grapple with these novel impressions or experiences, grasp them, it may be, throw them, and finally triumph over them. In fact we wonder at the riddles of nature, whether animate or inanimate, with a firm conviction that there is a solution to them all, even though we ourselves may not be able to find it. Wonder, no doubt, arises from ignorance, but from a peculiar kind of ignorance; from what might be called a fertile ignorance: an ignorance which, if we look back at the history of most of our sciences, will be found to have been the mother of all human knowledge. For thousands of years men have looked at the earth with its stratifications, in some places so clearly mapped out; for thousands of years they must have seen in their quarries and mines, as well as we ourselves, the imbedded petrifications of organic creatures: yet they looked and passed on without thinking more about it--they did not wonder. Not even an Aristotle had eyes to see; and the conception of a science of the earth, of Geology, was reserved for the eighteenth century.