What has just been said of ‘island’ leads me as by a natural transition to observe that one of the most frequent causes of alteration in the spelling of a word is a wrongly assumed derivation. It is then sought to bring the word into harmony with, and to make it by its spelling suggest, this derivation, which has been erroneously thrust upon it. Here is a subject which, followed out as it deserves, would form an interesting and instructive chapter in the history of language{252}. Let me offer one or two small contributions to it; noting first by the way how remarkable an evidence we have in this fact, of the manner in which not the learned only, but all persons learned and unlearned alike, crave to have these words not body only, but body and soul. What an attestation, I say, of this lies in the fact that where a word in its proper derivation is unintelligible to them, they will shape and mould it into some other form, not enduring that it should be a mere inert sound without sense in their ears; and if they do not know its right origin, will rather put into it a wrong one, than that it should have for them no meaning, and suggest no derivation at all{253}. There is probably no language in which such a process has not been going forward; in which it is not the explanation, in a vast number of instances, of changes in spelling and even in form, which words have undergone. I will offer a few examples of it from foreign tongues, before adducing any from our own. ‘Pyramid’ is a word, the spelling of which was affected in the Greek by an erroneous assumption of its derivation; the consequences of this error surviving in our own word to the present day. It is spelt by us with a ‘y’ in the first syllable, as it was spelt with the υ corresponding in the Greek. But why was this? It was because the Greeks assumed that the pyramids were so named from their having the appearance of _flame_ going up into a point{254}, and so they spelt ‘pyramid’, that they might find πῦρ or ‘pyre’ in it; while in fact ‘pyramid’ has nothing to do with flame or fire at all; being, as those best qualified to speak on the matter declare to us, an Egyptian word of quite a different signification{255}, and the Coptic letters being much better represented by the diphthong ‘ei’ than by the letter ‘y’, as no doubt, but for this mistaken notion of what the word was intended to mean, they would have been.