PATRONYMIC SURNAMES. It is impossible to say how important an influence have merely personal names exercised upon our nomenclature. The most familiar surnames we can meet with, saving that of ‘Smith,’ are to be found in this list. For frequency we have no names to be compared with ‘Jones,’ or ‘Williamson,’ or ‘Thompson,’ or ‘Richardson.’ How they came into being is easily manifest. Nothing could be more natural than that children should often pass current in the community in which they lived as the sons of ‘Thomas,’ or ‘William,’ or ‘Richard,’ or ‘John;’ and that these several relationships should be found in our directories as distinct sobriquets only shows that there was a particular generation in these families in which this title became permanent, and passed on to future descendants as an hereditary surname.[2] The interest that attaches to these patronymics is great—for it is by them we can best discover what names were in vogue at this period, and what not, and of those which were, by their relative frequency, in a measure, what were the most popular. Certainly the change is most extraordinary when we compare the past with the present. Some, once so popular that they scarce gave identity to the bearer, are now all but obsolete, while numerous appellations at present generally current were then utterly unknown. There are surnames familiar to our ears whose root as a Christian name is now passed out of knowledge; while, on the other hand, many a Christian name now daily upon our lips has no surname formed from it to tell of any lengthened existence. The fact is, that while our surnames, putting immigration aside, have been long at a standstill, we have ever been and are still adding to our stock of baptismal names.[3] Each new national crisis, each fresh achievement of our arms, each new princely bride imported from abroad—these events are being commemorated daily at the font. This is but the continuance of a custom, and one very natural, which has ever existed. Turn where we will in English history during the last eight hundred years, and we shall find the popular sympathies seeking an outlet in baptism. Did a prince of the blood royal meet with a hapless and cruel fate? His memory was at once embalmed in the names of the children born immediately afterwards, saving when a mother’s superstitious fears came in to prevent it. Did some national hero arise who upheld and asserted the people’s rights against a grinding and hateful tyranny? His name is speedily to be found inscribed on every hearth. The reverse is of equal significance. It is by the fact of a name, which must have been of familiar import, finding few to represent it, we can trace a people’s dislikes and a nation’s prejudices. A name once in favour, as a rule, however, kept its place. The cause to which it owed its rise had long passed into the shade of forgotten things, but the name, if it had but attained a certain hold, seems easily to have