But apart from the way in which it is used, there is a little mine of history buried in the word _electric_ itself. If we look it up in a dictionary we find that it is derived from a Greek word ‘ēlektron’, which meant ‘amber’. And in this etymology alone anyone who was completely ignorant of our civilization could perceive three facts—that at one time English scholars were acquainted with the language spoken by the ancient Greeks, that the Greeks did not know of electricity (for if they had there would have been nothing to prevent our borrowing their word for it), and that the idea of electricity has been connected in men’s minds with amber. Lastly, if we were completely ignorant of the quality of amber itself, the fact that ‘ēlektron’ is connected with ‘ēlektōr’, which means ‘gleaming’ or ‘the beaming sun’, might give us a faint hint of its nature. These are some of the many ways in which words may be made to disgorge the past that is bottled up inside them, as coal and wine, when we kindle or drink them, yield up their bottled sunshine. Now the deduction of information from the presence or absence of certain words is a common practice which has been known to critics and historians of literature, under some such name as “internal evidence”, for many years. It is from such evidence, for instance, that we deduce Shakespeare’s ignorance of the details of Roman civilization. But until a few years ago—within the memory of men still living—very little use had been made of language itself, that is to say, of the historical forms and meanings of words as interpreters both of the past and of the workings of men’s minds. It has only just begun to dawn on us that in our own language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us a knowledge of outward, dead things—such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of prehistoric animals and primitive men—language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.