It is a common prejudice among the learned that Language is a growth, and cannot in any sense be a structure; in other words, that it is purely the subject of the instinctive or unthoughted development of man, and not capable of being derived from reflection, or the deliberate application of the scheming faculty of the intellect. A little reflection will show that this opinion is only a half truth. It is certain that language has received its primitive form and first development by the instinctive method. It is equally true, however, that even as respects our existing languages, they have been overlaid by a subsequent formation, originating with the development of the _Sciences_, due wholly to reflection on the scheming faculty of man, and already equal in extension to the primitive growth. The Nomenclature of each of the Sciences has been devised by the reflective genius of individuals, and arbitrarily imposed, so to speak, upon the Spoken and Written Languages of the World, as they previously existed. From the cabinets and books of the learned, they gradually pass into the speech of the laity, and become incorporated with the primitive growth. If, instead of the Carbonate of Soda, the Protoxide of Nitrogen, and other Chemical Technicalities arbitrarily formed in modern times from the ancient Greek Language, terms which the ancient Greeks themselves never heard nor conceived of, we had words derived from similar combinations of Anglo-Saxon or German Roots; if, for instance, for Protoxide of Nitrogen, we had the _First-sour-stuffness_, or the _First-sharp-thingness of Salt-petreness_, and so throughout the immense vocabulary of chemistry, what an essentially different aspect would the whole English Language now wear! Had Lavoisier, therefore, chosen the Anglo-Saxon or the German as the basis of the chemical nomenclature now in use, we can readily perceive how the intellectual device of a single savant, would, ere this time, have sent a broad current of new development through the heart of all the advanced Languages of the earth; of a different kind wholly, but no more extensive, no more novel, and truly foreign to the primitive instinctual growth of those Languages, no more purely the result of intellectual contrivance, than the current of development to which he actually did give origin.