are still, everywhere becoming other than they were. Yet they together constitute but one department of linguistic change ; another, affecting the internal "All that is born must die" seems a law almost as inexorable in the domain of speech as in that of organic life. We have next to turn our attention to the principles underlying this department of linguistic change, and to some of the modes of its action and the effects which it produces. For it is composition, the building up of words out of elements formerly independent, that opens a wide field to the operation of phonetic change, and at the same time gives it its highest importance as an agency in the production and modification of language. If all words were of simple structure and brief form, their alterations would be confined within comparatively narrow limits, and would be of inferior consequence as constituting one of the processes of linguistic growth. The reason which makes phonetic change rifest in linguistic combinations is the same with that which creates the possibility of any phonetic change at all in language. It is inherent in the nature of a word, and its relation to the idea which it represents. A word, as we have already seen, is not the natural reflection of an idea, nor its description,  ​ nor its definition; it is only its designation, an arbitrary and conventional sign with which we learn to associate it. It thus becomes to all intents and purposes an English word, a naturalized citizen in our tongue, invested with all the rights and duties of a native—and divested, also, of those which belonged to it by hereditary descent, among its own kith and kin. We proceed, accordingly, to apply to it a whole apparatus of English inflections, long since worked out by the processes of linguistic change, and  ​ not yet destroyed by the same processes. Each constituent of the spoken alphabet requires, in order to its production, a certain kind and amount of effort on the part of the various organs concerned in articulate utterance. Some of them call for greater change from the quiescent condition of the organs, and so are in themselves harder to utter, than others. And again—what is of far higher importance in phonology—some are much harder to utter than others in connection with one another; the changes of position and mode of action of the articulating organs which they imply are more difficult of production and combination. No word that a community has once formed and uttered is incapable of being kept unchanged in their use; yet use breeds change in all the constituents of every language: each sound in a word exercises an assimilating influence over the others in its neighbourhood, tending to bring them into some other form which is more easily uttered in connection with itself. He has to trace out the changes which have actually taken place in the spoken structure of language, and to discover, so far as he is able, their ground, in the physical character and relations of the sounds concerned, in the positions and motions of the articulating organs by which those sounds are produced. He is thus enabled to point out, in the great majority of cases, how it is that a certain sound, in this or that situation, should be easily and naturally dropped, or converted into such and such, another sound. Yet they together constitute but one department of linguistic change; another, affecting the internal content of language, the meaning of its words, equally demands notice from us. To this we have not yet distinctly directed our attention, although our illustrations have necessarily set forth, to a certain extent, its action and effects, along with those of the external modifications which we have been especially considering. It is a part of linguistic history which, to say the least, possesses not less interest and importance than the other. That would be but an imperfect and awkward language, all whose expansion of significant content was made without aid from the processes which generate new words and forms; and the highest value of external change lies in its facilitation of internal, in its office of providing signs for new ideas, of expanding a vocabulary and grammatical system into a more complete adaptedness to their required uses. But change of meaning is a more fundamental and essential part of linguistic growth than change of form. These examples are of themselves sufficient to place before our eyes the most important features in the history of significant change of words, the principal processes by which—even apart from combination or phonetic change, but yet more effectively in connection with these—the existing vocabulary of a language is adaptable to the growing knowledge and varying needs of those who use it. It may do so, and it will, if there lie in the nature and circumstances of the people who speak it a capacity for such growth. The speech of a community is the reflex of its average and collective capacity, because, as we have already seen, the community alone is able to make and change language; nothing can become a part of the common treasure of expression which is not generally apprehended, approved, and accepted. It is not true, as is sometimes taught or implied, that a genius or commanding intellect, arising among a people, can impress a marked effect upon its language—least of all, in the earlier stages of linguistic development, or amid ruder and more primitive conditions of culture. We can trace the successive stages of the transfer, but we cannot see the historical conditions and linguistic habits which facilitated it, or tell why, among all the Germanic races, the English alone should have given the suffix this peculiar application; why the others content themselves without any distinctive adverbial suffix, nor feel that their modes of expressing the adverbial relation are less clear and forcible than ours. And so in every other like case.