Ignorance of this vastly important truth has pecuniarily ruined thousands upon thousands of the people of this country during the last 20 years. They have gone into the mining of metals, gold and silver and copper, sometimes as individuals and more often as companies gathering in the driblets of investors, under the notion that if they could only get these metals out of the ground their Value would be just as secure and fixed as their physical qualities. They found out their mistake in bitterness of spirit. For example, the Value of an ounce of silver has gone down and down and down as the quantity of silver excavated has increased under zealous digging, in accordance with the universal and pitiless law of Supply and Demand. So of copper. And both these great monetary interests went to Congress and secured the passage of laws designed to lift artificially the Values that were sinking naturally under increased Supply, the silver men by a law requiring the United States to buy and mint at least $2,000,000 in silver each month whether the silver dollars were needed or not, and the copper men by a law imposing a tariff-tax on foreign copper that has actually lifted the price two cents a pound on the average of the whole 20 years above the average price of copper in the markets of the world. Take another illustration of disappearing Values, this time in lands, long supposed to be the most stable in value of all human possessions. Whole tiers of farms in the writer's native town in New Hampshire, and for that matter all over New England as well, that in his boyhood supported large families, and when sold usually brought a fair price, are now abandoned of their owners as wholly or comparatively worthless, and are allowed to grow up into forest again, without a sign of present human habitation upon them. Value is something that needs to be studied carefully, if it is to be fully understood. (b) Perhaps the origin of the word, "Value," will throw some light upon its nature and changes. Etymology can never be safely despised in scientific discussions, although words are perpetually changing their meaning in the mouths of men. No science can afford to build upon the transient meaning of a word; and yet it is clearly possible so to use words as to reach and describe ultimate and unchanging facts in science; and some knowledge of the original meaning of words is always a help in getting at those definitions and analyses of facts that are permanent in science. Let us hold fast to the cheering truth exemplified on all sides of every science, that a just analysis and exact description of ultimate facts in any department of knowledge are for all time, in spite of the transient meaning of current words.