language furnished or adopted a root, all its branches, in every part of speech, were legitimated by giving them their appropriate terminations. Αδελφος, αδελφη, αδελφιδιον, αδελφοτης, αδελφιξις, αδελφιδους, αδελφικος, αδελφιζω, αδελφικως. And this should be the law of every language. Thus, having adopted the adjective _fraternal_, it is a root which should legitimate _fraternity_, _fraternation_, _fraternisation_, _fraternism_, _to fraternate_, _fraternise_, _fraternally_. And give the word _neologism_ to our language, as a root, and it should give us its fellow substantives, _neology_, _neologist_, _neologisation_; its adjectives, _neologous_, _neological_, _neologistical_; its verb, _neologise_; and adverb, _neologically_. Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage. Society is the workshop in which new ones are elaborated. When an individual uses a new word, if ill formed, it is rejected in society; if well formed, adopted, and after due time, laid up in the depository of dictionaries. And if, in this process of sound neologisation, our trans-Atlantic brethren shall not choose to accompany us, we may furnish, after the Ionians, a second example of a colonial dialect improving on its primitive. But enough of criticism: let me turn to your puzzling letter of May the 12th, on matter, spirit, motion, &c. Its crowd of scepticisms kept me from sleep. I read it, and laid it down; read it, and laid it down, again and again; and to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, "I feel, therefore I exist." I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existences then. I call them _matter_. I feel them changing place. This gives me _motion_. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it _void_, or _nothing_, or _immaterial space_. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive _thought_ to be an action of a particular organization of matter, formed for that purpose by its creator, as well as that _attraction_ is an action of matter, or _magnetism_ of loadstone. When he who denies to the Creator the power of endowing matter with the mode of action called _thinking_, shall show how he could endow the sun with the mode of action called _attraction_, which reins the planets in the track of their orbits, or how an absence of matter can have a will, and by that will put matter into motion, then the Materialist may be lawfully required to explain the process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of _immaterial_ existences, is to talk of _nothings_. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say, they are _nothings_, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by the Lockes, the Tracys, and the Stewarts.