In the cases hitherto adduced, it has been the omission of a letter which has clouded and concealed the etymology. The intrusion of a letter sometimes does the same. Thus in the early editions of _Paradise Lost_, and in all writers of that time, you will find ‘scent’, an odour, spelt ‘sent’. It was better so; there is no other noun substantive ‘sent’, with which it is in danger of being confounded; while its relation with ‘sentio’, with ‘re_sent_’{248}, ‘dis_sent_’, and the like, is put out of sight by its novel spelling; the intrusive ‘_c_’, serves only to mislead. The same thing was attempted with ‘site’, ‘situate’, ‘situation’, spelt for a time by many, ‘s_c_ite’, ‘s_c_ituate’, ‘s_c_ituation’; but it did not continue with these. Again, ‘whole’, in Wiclif’s Bible, and indeed much later, occasionally as far down as Spenser, is spelt ‘hole’, without the ‘w’ at the beginning. The present orthography may have the advantage of at once distinguishing the word to the eye from any other; but at the same time the initial ‘w’, now prefixed, hides its relation to the verb ‘to heal’, with which it is closely allied. The ‘whole’ man is he whose hurt is ‘healed’ or covered{249} (we say of the convalescent that he ‘recovers’){250}; ‘whole’ being closely allied to ‘hale’ (integer), from which also by its modern spelling it is divided. ‘Wholesome’ has naturally followed the fortunes of ‘whole’; it was spelt ‘holsome’ once. Of ‘island’ too our present spelling is inferior to the old, inasmuch as it suggests a hybrid formation, as though the word were made up of the Latin ‘insula’, and the Saxon ‘land’. It is quite true that ‘isle’ _is_ in relation with, and descent from, ‘insula’, ‘isola’, ‘île’; and hence probably the misspelling of ‘island’. This last however has nothing to do with ‘insula’, being identical with the German ‘eiland’, the Anglo-Saxon ‘ealand’{251} and signifying the sea-land, or land girt, round with the sea. And it is worthy of note that this ‘s’ in the first syllable of ‘island’ is quite of modern introduction. In all the earlier versions of the Scriptures, and in the Authorized Version as at first set forth, it is ‘iland’; while in proof that this is not accidental, it may be observed that, while ‘iland’ has not the ‘s’, ‘isle’ has it (see Rev. i. 9). ‘Iland’ indeed is the spelling which we meet with far down into the seventeenth century. {Sidenote: _Folk-etymologies_}