"A group of children near Boston invented the _cat language_, so called because its object was to admit of free intercourse with cats, to whom it was mostly talked, and by whom it was presumed to be comprehended. In this tongue the cat was naturally the chief subject of nomenclature; all feline positions were observed and named, and the language was rich in such epithets, as Arabic contains a vast number of expressions for _lion_. Euphonic changes were very arbitrary and various, differing for the same termination; but the adverbial ending _-ly_ was always _-osh; terribly, terriblosh_. A certain percentage of words were absolutely independent, or at least of obscure origin. The grammar tended to Chinese or infantine simplicity; _ta_ represented any case of any personal pronoun. A proper name might vary in sound according to the euphonic requirements of the different Christian names by which it was preceded. There were two dialects, one, however, stigmatized as _provincial_. This invention of language must be very common, since other cases have fallen under our notice in which children have composed dictionaries of such" (313. 25). This characterization of child-speech offers not a few points of contact with primitive languages, and might indeed almost have been written of one of them. More recently Colonel Higginson (262) has given some details of "a language formed for their own amusement by two girls of thirteen or thereabouts, both the children of eminent scientific men, and both unusually active-minded and observant." This dialect "is in the most vivid sense a living language," and the inventors, who keep pruning and improving it, possess a manuscript dictionary of some two hundred words, which, it is to be hoped, will some day be published. An example or two from those given by Colonel Higginson will serve to indicate the general character of the vocabulary:-- _bojiwassis_, "the feeling you have just before you jump, don't you know--when you mean to jump and want to do it, and are just a little bit afraid to do it." _spygri_, "the way you feel when you have just jumped and are awfully proud of it." _pippadolify_, "stiff and starched like the young officers at Washington." Other information respecting this "home-made dialect," with its revising academy of children and its standard dictionary, must be sought in the entertaining pages of Colonel Higginson, who justly says of this triumph of child-invention: "It coins thought into syllables, and one can see that, if a group of children like these were taken and isolated until they grew up, they would forget in time which words were their own and which were in Worcester's Dictionary; and _stowish_ and _krono_ and _bojiwassis_ would gradually become permanent forms of speech" (262. 108).