caable, is for cadable, Lat. cadabulum, evidently from Gr. Kaтaßоλń, a throwing down. Calibre is either from qua libra, referring to the size of the bullet, or from the Ar. qalib, mould or model. Caliver, as Marsh shows in his note, was taken from calibre, and not the reverse. Cable, Fr. câble, Sp. Pg. cable, It. cappio, is from the Low Lat. capulum, a rope, seen in Isidore, from capere, to take, hold, and finally, capstan comes from the same verb, through the Sp. cabestrante, capstan, cabestrare, to bind, especially with a halter, cabestro, a halter, chain, Lat. capistrum, a halter, band.

Cinder. A. S. sinder, is not connected with Fr. cendre, Lat. cinis, ashes, although its spelling was influenced by it. The A. S. sinder is dross, scoria, from sinder, synder, separate, asunder; referring especially to the scales struck off from red-hot iron by the blacksmith.

Crab Mr. Wedgwood connects with grab, as the pinching animal. He considers it one of a series of words - such as cramp, grab, clamp, club, etc. of which the radical idea was a lump or thick mass, from whence the notion of sticking together, contracting, compressing, was derived. Now Crab, A. S. crabbe, Ger. krebs, L. Ger. Dan. krabbe, is the same as the Lat. carabus, Gr. κápaßos, a crab, and a beetle, Lat. scarabaeus, Skr. çarabha, a locust. This is from the root çar, char, kal, to go; and crab is simply a walking animal.

Cress, A. S. cerse, cärse, Du. kers, Ger. kresse, is not from "the crunching sound of eating the crisp green herb," but from O. H. Ger. kresan, to creep.

The word divan, Mr. Wedgwood has evidently not examined. He merely says: "The raised bench or cushion at the upper end of a Turkish room on which the principal persons sit; hence, as a council or court of justice." The signification of a seat is the last one in the historical development of the word. The origin is the Persian dîwân, a book containing many leaves, a collection of writings, especially poems (compare Goethe's "West-östlicher Divan"), an account-book, a register; then, a council, senate, board of accounts, custom-house (in Fr. douane, It. dogana); next,

a council-chamber; and finally, the seats round the wall of any raised seat.

such a room

Dock, a basin for ships, he explains "through the notion of stopping up, hemming in, confining. The Ger. docke, signifying primarily a bunch, is applied to the tap by which the water of a fish-pond is kept in or let off. Hence the name seems to have been transferred to a naval dock, the essential provision of which is, the power of keeping in or shutting out the water by an analogous contrivance, though on a greatly magnified scale." It can hardly be doubted that the Northern words corresponding to dock (Du. dok, Dan. docke, Sw. docka, Ger. dock, docke) are of comparatively modern origin, for they are not found in the older languages, not even the Middle High German; and they are probably identical with L. Lat. doga, doha, dova, a ditch, It. Pr. doga, O. Fr. douhe, N. Fr. douve. All these come from the Lat. doga, a sort of vessel, Gr. doxń, doxeîov, a receptacle, from déxeodai, to receive.

In looking through this volume, we have found history distorted, and all rules of sound criticism violated; and in closing it, we must express our regret that the Philological Society, in whose Journal much of it was originally published, should have so far committed itself as to entrust to Mr. Wedgwood the supervision of the etymological part of their New Dictionary; for, to judge from the present specimen, it will neither be a credit to English scholarship,1 nor an aid to English students.

The American edition is enlarged by Notes by Mr. George P. Marsh; which, in our opinion, do not add materially to the value of the work. It is probable that the republishers merely wished for the name of this distinguished scholar to assist the sale. Mr. Marsh must have seen that to comment adequately upon the work would be, in fact, to rewrite it. A few of his notes are interesting and valuable, and to some of these we have previously referred. We wish that we had space left us to insert his able refuta

1 The Greek throughout is printed without accents.

tion of the author's ridiculous derivation of the words better, boot, bait, and abet, from bet! bet! a huntsman's cry to the dogs. But often the notes are too long and too wandering; as those on amber and anneal, and that on maim, under the word cablish, which should have waited for the second volume. The disquisition on at would be much more in place in an English grammar, or in Mr. Marsh's own "Lectures." Although the annotator does not thoroughly espouse Mr. Wedgwood's theory, he is occasionally led into similar mistakes. He does not hold to the derivation of brick, from the Lat. imbrex, a gutter tile, which he propounded in his "Lectures"; but we see that he still thinks that commodore comes from the Pg. capitão môr, chief captain. Now it is possible that commodore might be corrupted from Fr. commandeur, Pg. commendador, It. commendatore; but in capitão môr the similarity consists only in the first and the last letters. We are almost tempted to exclaim with Cotta: "In enodandis autem nominibus quod miserandum sit laboratis? .... quamquam, quoniam Neptunum a nando appellatum putas, nullum erit nomen, quod non possis una littera explicare unde dictum sit."

Sometimes, too, Mr. Marsh forgets his own rule about historical derivations, and tells us that admiral came into the language of Europe through the Byzantine Greek άunpaîos, which occurs in Theophanes Isaurus, who lived from 758 A. D. to 815 A. D. Du Cange asserts that it came directly from the Moors, through the Sicilians and Genoese; and he cites amiratus, from the Vita Carol. Mag. A. D. 801.

With regard to apricot, Mr. Marsh says: "The apricot, as we know from Pliny, N. H. l. xv. c. 12, was introduced into Italy in the time of that writer, and there is no doubt that it came to Rome from Armenia. It is now called barkuk in Persian, and the same name is given to a species of plum by the Arabs. These nations would not have borrowed the name of a native fruit from the Romans, and apricot, supposed to be from the Latin praecox, because the fruit ripened earlier than the common peach, with which it

was confounded, is probably a case of accommodation from the Oriental barkuk." Now it is true that our apricot, O. Eng. and Fr. abricot, comes from the Arabic al-birqûq, through the Sp. albaricoque, Pg. albricoque, It. albercocco. But the Arabic, in its turn, is derived from the Lat. praecox, praecocia, through the Greek of Dioscorides, who says, 1. 165, τὰ μῆλα ἀρμηνιακά, Ρωμαϊστὶ δὲ πραικόκκια. Dioscorides's treatise on Materia Medica was, as is well known, translated into Arabic, and was the chief authority in their schools. Through this the Arabians gained many words, and among them this.

ARTICLE IV.

THE STATE AND SLAVERY.

BY PROF. E. P. BARROWS, ANDOVER, MASS.

THE treatment received by the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among robbers, too truly represents the fate that has overtaken the question of American slavery. It has fallen into the hands of partisan politicians, and been made by them a powerful engine for the advancement of sectional interests, while the true welfare of the nation as a whole, and of the slaveholding states in particular, has been forgotten. This was not always so. It is well known that the patriots of the revolution, both North and South, regarded slavery as a great evil, and earnestly desired its extinction.

"Slavery has been opposed by eminent men in America from the beginning. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Jay, Hamilton, and many more of those who took a conspicuous part in laying the foundations of the government, regarded slavery as a great evil, inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the spirit of Christianity. They confidently expected that it would gradually pass away before the advancing power of civilization and freedom; and, shrinking

from what they regarded as insurmountable obstacles to emancipation in their own time, they consented, in the formation of the constitution, to give the system certain advantages, which they hoped would be temporary, and therefore not dangerous to the stability of the government."1

66

This statement admits of abundant corroboration from the documents that have come down to us from the early history of our government. Mr. Jefferson attempted to incorporate into the Declaration of Independence a clause reproaching Great Britain in the most severe terms for the introduction into the colonies of slavery and the slave-trade, which he calls "a war against human nature itself,” and a piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers." But the clause, being objected to, was struck out.2 Again, in 1787, when the ordinance was passed excluding slavery from the territory north-west of the Ohio river, all the Southern States then represented in Congress voted in its favor; and, according to Mr. Benton, it was "pre-eminently the work of the South. The ordinance, as it now stands, was reported by a committee of five members, of whom three were from slaveholding states, and two (and one of them the chairman) were from Virginia alone." 3 This ordinance was coeval with the formation of our present federal constitution, and the Southern States insisted upon the insertion into it, as into the constitution, of a clause for the

1 New Am. Cyclopaedia, Article, Slavery.

2 The whole clause reads thus: "He has waged eruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

3 Thirty Years in the U. S. Senate, Vol. I, pp. 133, 134.