IV._ Act 3, Sc. 2; on ‘shrub’, Junius’ _Etymologicon_, s. v. ‘syrup’; on ‘sentiment’ and ‘cajole’ Skinner, s. vv., in his _Etymologicon_ (‘vox nuper civitate donata’); and on ‘opera’ Evelyn’s _Memoirs and Diary_, 1827, vol. i, pp. 189, 190. In such a collection should be included those passages of our literature which supply implicit evidence for the non-existence of a word up to a certain moment. It may be urged that it is difficult, nay impossible, to prove a negative; and yet a passage like this from Bolingbroke makes certain that when it was written the word ‘isolated’ did not exist in our language: “The events we are witnesses of in the course of the longest life, appear to us very often original, unprepared, signal and _unrelative_: if I may use such a word for want of a better in English. In French I would say _isolés_” (_Notes and Queries_, No. 226). Compare Lord Chesterfield in a letter to Bishop Chenevix, of date March 12, 1767: “I have survived almost all my cotemporaries, and as I am too old to make new acquaintances, I find myself _isolé_”. So, too, it is pretty certain that ‘amphibious’ was not yet English, when one writes (in 1618): “We are like those creatures called ἀμφίβια, who live in water or on land”. Ζωολογία, the title of a book published in 1649, makes it clear that ‘zoology’ was not yet in our vocabulary, as ζωόφυτον (Jackson) proves the same for ‘zoophyte’, and πολυθεϊσμος (Gell) for ‘polytheism’. One precaution, let me observe, would be necessary in the collecting, or rather in the adopting of any statements about the newness of a word--for the passages themselves, even when erroneous, ought not the less to be noted--namely, that, where there is the least motive for suspicion, no one’s affirmation ought to be accepted simply and at once as to the novelty of a word; for all here are liable to error. Thus more than one which Sir Thomas Elyot indicates as new in his time, ‘magnanimity’ for example (_The Governor_, 2, 14), are to be met in Chaucer. When Skinner affirmed of ‘sentiment’ that it had only recently obtained the rights of English citizenship from the translators of French books, he was altogether mistaken, this word being also one of continual recurrence in Chaucer. An intelligent correspondent gives in _Notes and Queries_, No. 225, a useful catalogue of recent neologies in our speech, which yet would require to be used with caution, for there are at least half a dozen in the list which have not the smallest right to be so considered. {126} There is an admirable Essay by Leibnitz with this view (_Opera_, vol. vi, part 2, pp. 6-51) in French and German, with this title, _Considérations sur la Culture et la Perfection de la Langue Allemande_.