The word _witch_, these bibliolaters take it for granted, must mean exactly what the original Hebrew means, or the Greek word chosen by the LXX.; so much, and neither more nor less. That is, from total ignorance of the machinery by which language moves, they fancy that every idea and word which exists, or has existed, for any nation, ancient or modern, must have a direct interchangeable equivalent in all other languages; and that, if the dictionaries do not show it, _that_ must be because the dictionaries are bad. Will these worthy people have the goodness, then, to translate _coquette_ into Hebrew, and _post-office_ into Greek? The fact is, that all languages, and in the ratio of their development, offer ideas absolutely separate and exclusive to themselves. In the highly cultured languages of England, France, and Germany, are words, by thousands, which are strictly untranslatable. They may be approached, but cannot be reflected as from a mirror. To take an image from the language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk of the original word and its translated representative is, in thousands of instances, not _annular;_ the centres do not coincide; the words overlap; and this arises from the varying modes in which different nations _combine_ ideas. The French word shall combine the elements, _l, m, n, o_--the nearest English word, perhaps, _m, n, o, p_. For instance, in all words applied to the _nuances_ of manners, and generally to _social_ differences, how prodigious is the wealth of the French language! How merely untranslatable for all Europe! I suppose, my bibliolater, you have not yet finished your Hebrew or Samaritan translation of _coquette_. Well, you shall be excused from _that_, if you will only translate it into English. You cannot: you are obliged to keep the French word; and yet you take for granted, without inquiry, that in the word 'witchcraft,' and in the word 'witch,' applied to the sorceress of Endor, our authorized English Bible of King James's day must be correct. And your wicked bibliolatrous ancestors proceeded on that idea throughout Christendom to murder harmless, friendless, and oftentimes crazy old women. Meantime the witch of Endor in no respect resembled our modern domestic witch.[Footnote: _'The domestic witch.'_--It is the common notion that the superstition of the _evil eye_, so widely diffused in the Southern lands, and in some, not a slumbering, but a fiercely operative superstition, is unknown in England and other Northern latitudes. On the contrary, to my thinking, the regular old vulgar witch of England and Scotland was but an impersonatrix of the very same superstition. Virgil expresses this mode of sorcery to the letter, when his shepherd says-- 'Nescio quis teneros _oculus_ mihi fascinat agnos?'