Of non-scientific words, both Greek and Latin, some have made their way among us quite in these latter times. Burke in the House of Commons is said to have been the first who employed the word ‘inimical’{68}. He also launched the verb ‘to spheterize’ in the sense of to appropriate or make one’s own; but this without success. Others have been more fortunate; ‘æsthetic’ we have got indeed _through_ the Germans, but _from_ the Greeks. Tennyson has given allowance to ‘æon’{69}; and ‘myth’ is a deposit which wide and far-reaching controversies have left in the popular language. ‘Photography’ is an example of what I was just now speaking of--namely, a scientific word which has travelled beyond the limits of the science which it designates and which gave it birth. ‘Stereotype’ is another word of the same character. It was invented--not the thing, but the word,--by Didot not very long since; but it is now absorbed into healthy general circulation, being current in a secondary and figurative sense. Ruskin has given to ‘ornamentation’ the sanction and authority of his name. ‘Normal’ and ‘abnormal’, not quite so new, are yet of recent introduction into the language{70}. {Sidenote: _German Importations_} When we consider the near affinity between the English and German languages, which, if not sisters, may at least be regarded as first cousins, it is somewhat remarkable that almost since the day when they parted company, each to fulfil its own destiny, there has been little further commerce between them in the matter of giving or taking. At any rate adoptions on our part from the German have been till within this period extremely rare. ‘Crikesman’ (Kriegsmann) and ‘brandschat’ (Brandschatz), with some other German words common enough in the _State Papers_ of the sixteenth century, found no permanent place in the language. The explanation lies in the fact that the literary activity of Germany did not begin till very late, nor our interest in it till later still, not indeed till the beginning of the present century. Yet ‘plunder’, as I have mentioned elsewhere, was brought back from Germany about the beginning of our Civil Wars, by the soldiers who had served under Gustavus Adolphus and his captains{71}. And ‘trigger’, written ‘tricker’ in _Hudibras_ is manifestly the German ‘drücker’{72}, though none of our dictionaries have marked it as such; a word first appearing at the same period, it may have reached us through the same channel. ‘Iceberg’ (eisberg) also we must have taken whole from the German, as, had we constructed the word for ourselves, we should have made it not ‘ice_berg_’, but ‘ice-_mountain_’. I have not found it in our earlier voyagers, often as they speak of the ‘icefield’, which yet is not exactly the same thing. An English ‘swindler’ is not exactly a German ‘schwindler’, yet the notion of the ‘nebulo’, though more latent in the German, is common to both; and we must have drawn the word from