Thus, suppose the English language to be divided into a hundred parts; of these, to make a rough distribution, sixty would be Saxon; thirty would be Latin (including of course the Latin which has come to us through the French); five would be Greek. We should thus have assigned ninety-five parts, leaving the other five, perhaps too large a residue, to be divided among all the other languages from which we have adopted isolated words{3}. And yet these are not few; from our wide extended colonial empire we come in contact with half the world; we have picked up words in every quarter, and, the English language possessing a singular power of incorporating foreign elements into itself, have not scrupled to make many of these our own{4}. {Sidenote: _Oriental Words_} Thus we have a certain number of Hebrew words, mostly, if not entirely, belonging to religious matters, as ‘amen’, ‘cabala’, ‘cherub’, ‘ephod’, ‘gehenna’, ‘hallelujah’, ‘hosanna’, ‘jubilee’, ‘leviathan’, ‘manna’, ‘Messiah’, ‘sabbath’, ‘Satan’, ‘seraph’, ‘shibboleth’, ‘talmud’. The Arabic words in our language are more numerous; we have several arithmetical and astronomical terms, as ‘algebra’, ‘almanack’, ‘azimuth’, ‘cypher’{5}, ‘nadir’, ‘talisman’, ‘zenith’, ‘zero’; and chemical, for the Arabs were the chemists, no less than the astronomers and arithmeticians of the middle ages; as ‘alcohol’, ‘alembic’, ‘alkali’, ‘elixir’. Add to these the names of animals, plants, fruits, or articles of merchandize first introduced by them to the notice of Western Europe; as ‘amber’, ‘artichoke’, ‘barragan’, ‘camphor’, ‘coffee’, ‘cotton’, ‘crimson’, ‘gazelle’, ‘giraffe’, ‘jar’, ‘jasmin’, ‘lake’ (lacca), ‘lemon’, ‘lime’, ‘lute’, ‘mattress’, ‘mummy’, ‘saffron’, ‘sherbet’, ‘shrub’, ‘sofa’, ‘sugar’, ‘syrup’, ‘tamarind’; and some further terms, ‘admiral’, ‘amulet’, ‘arsenal’, ‘assassin’, ‘barbican’, ‘caliph’, ‘caffre’, ‘carat’, ‘divan’, ‘dragoman’{6}, ‘emir’, ‘fakir’, ‘firman’, ‘harem’, ‘hazard’, ‘houri’, ‘magazine’, ‘mamaluke’, ‘minaret’, ‘monsoon’, ‘mosque’, ‘nabob’, ‘razzia’, ‘sahara’, ‘simoom’, ‘sirocco’, ‘sultan’, ‘tarif’, ‘vizier’; and I believe we shall have nearly completed the list. We have moreover a few Persian words, as ‘azure’, ‘bazaar’, ‘bezoar’, ‘caravan’, ‘caravanserai’, ‘chess’, ‘dervish’, ‘lilac’, ‘orange’, ‘saraband’, ‘taffeta’, ‘tambour’, ‘turban’; this last appearing in strange forms at its first introduction into the language, thus ‘tolibant’ (Puttenham), ‘tulipant’ (Herbert’s _Travels_), ‘turribant’ (Spenser), ‘turbat’, ‘turbant’, and at length ‘turban’. We have also a few Turkish, such as ‘chouse’, ‘janisary’, ‘odalisque’, ‘sash’, ‘tulip’{7}. Of ‘civet’{8} and ‘scimitar’{9} I believe it can only be asserted that they are Eastern. The following are Hindostanee, ‘avatar’, ‘bungalow’, ‘calico’, ‘chintz’, ‘cowrie’, ‘lac’, ‘muslin’, ‘punch’, ‘rupee’, ‘toddy’. ‘Tea’, or ‘tcha’, as it was spelt at first, of course is Chinese, so too are ‘junk’ and ‘satin’{10}.