expresses human activity by means of verbs, the living and vivifying portion of speech by the side of which the remainder may almost be considered as dead matter. The question of the birth of the substantive, without being deliberately posed as a problem, occupied the minds of the Grecian philosophers, and was involved in their researches concerning the relation of an object to the name it bears, of the unknown cause by which a certain name designates a certain object and no other. Whilst the Greeks speculated on the subject after a tentative manner, building up theories which later observations were not long in upsetting, the Hindoos were also engaged in efforts to solve the problem by the help of a more reliable process--the historical. The early grammarians, having found that words came from roots expressing general concepts, and that these concepts represented some sort of activity, made this fact the basis of their studies; profound thinkers as they were they discovered that man at first could not give a name to a tree, an animal, a star, a river, nor to any other object without discovering first some special quality that seemed at the time most characteristic of the object to be named. Sanscrit has a root _As_, having amongst other meanings sharpness, quickness; from the same root came words for needle, point, sharpness of sight, quickness of thought; this root is found in the Sanscrit name for a horse, which is _asva_, runner or racer, one who leaves space quickly behind him. Many other names might have been given to the horse besides the one here mentioned, but all must recall some characteristic trait of this animal; that name, _the quick_, could also have been given to other animals, but having been repeatedly applied to one, it became unfit for other purposes, and the horse retains undisputed possession. The Sanscrit _aksha_, eye, comes from the same root as, which also meant to point, to pierce. Another name for eye in Sanscrit is _netram_, leader, from _nî_, to lead. Noiré has just put forth an ingenious theory, that the first substantives would not be miller, digger, weaver, carpenter; but flour, cave, pit, mat, hedge, club, arrow, boat, because these were what had been thought and willed, whilst the agents, of no account from that point of view, remained in the shade, forgotten, and it is possible that for some time no names were given to them. “When we have once seen that thought in its true sense is always conceptual, taking a verbal form, and that every word is derived from a conceptual root, we shall be ready for the assertion that words being conceptual can never stand for a single percept.”--MAX MÜLLER.