{125} A passage from Hacket’s _Life of Archbishop Williams_, part 2, p. 144, marks the first rise of this word, and the quarter from whence it arose: “When they [the Presbyterians] saw that he was not _selfish_ (it is a word of their own new mint), etc”. In Whitlock’s _Zootomia_ (1654) there is another indication of it as a novelty, p. 364: “If constancy may be tainted with this _selfishness_ (to use our _new wordings_ of old and general actings)”--It is he who in his striking essay, _The Grand Schismatic, or Suist Anatomized_, puts forward his own words, ‘suist’, and ‘suicism’, in lieu of those which have ultimately been adopted. ‘Suicism’, let me observe, had not in his time the obvious objection of resembling another word nearly, and being liable to be confused with it; for ‘suicide’ did not then exist in the language, nor indeed till some twenty years later. The coming up of ‘suicide’ is marked by this passage in Phillips’ _New World of Words_, 1671, 3rd ed.: “Nor less to be exploded is the word ‘_suicide_’, which may as well seem to participate of _sus_ a sow, as of the pronoun _sui_”. In the _Index_ to Jackson’s Works, published two years later, it is still ‘_suicidium_’--“the horrid _suicidium_ of the Jews at York”. ‘Suicide’ is apparently of much later introduction into French. Génin (_Récréations Philol._ vol. i, p. 194) places it about the year 1728, and makes the Abbé Desfontaines its first sponsor. He is wrong, as the words just quoted show, in supposing that we borrowed it from the French, or that the word did not exist in English till the middle of last century. The French sometimes complain that the fashion of suicide was borrowed from England. It would seem at all events probable that the word was so borrowed.