When we have acquired this knowledge there are few things more interesting than noting the changes which words undergo in the different tongues, and learning how to detect the same words under various disguises. And when we have begun to do this, it is by comparing the words of our own language with corresponding words in the allied tongues German, Norse, or Dutch, whatever it may be, that we are most frequently reminded of the meaning of words which have half grown out of use with us. As, for instance, when the German _Leiche_ (corpse) reminds us of the meaning of lich-gate (A.S. lica, a corpse) and Lichfield; or the Norse _moos_, a marshy or heathy region, explains our _moss_-troopers. I doubt if most people quite know what sea-mews are, still more if the word mewstone (which, for example, is the name of a rock near Plymouth) would at once call up the right idea into their mind. But the German _Möwe_, sea-gull, makes it all plain. How curious is the relationship between _earth_ and _hearth_, which is exactly reproduced in the German _Erde_ and _Herde!_ or the obsolete use of the word _tide_ for ‘time’ (the original meaning of the tides--the ‘times,’) in the expression ‘Time and tide wait for no man’! But in the Norse we have the same expression _Tid og Time_, which signifies exactly Macbeth’s ‘time and the hour.’ And of course these words, our _tide_, Norse _Tid_, are the correspondants of the German _zeit_. When once we have detected how often the German _z_ corresponds to the English _t_--as in _Zahn_, tooth; _Zehe_, toe; _Zählen_, to tell (_i.e._, to count); _Zinn_, tin--we have no difficulty in seeing that our _town_ may correspond to the German _Zaun_, a hedge: and we guess, what is in fact the case, that the original meaning of town was only an enclosed or empaled place. The relationship of our _fee_ to the German _Vieh_, cattle, and the proof that the earliest money with us was cattle-money, would, at first sight, be perhaps not so easily surmised by a mere comparison of German and English words. These are only one or two of the ten thousand points of interest which rise up before us almost immediately after we have, so to say, stepped outside the walls of our own language into the domains of its very nearest relations.