be at strife with one another over the time when the one or the other was to use the water. The one might dam the water and flood the land of his neighbor above him, or he might divert the water and deprive the man below him of the use of the water. As this circumstance was constantly productive of strife and often of the bitterest kind, the word lost this specific use and took on the idea of any relation that is bitter in animosity or fierce in strife. And thus people are rivals still, they are in pursuit of the same object and are trying to obtain that which only one can possess; and yet they are far away from the maddening rush of waters. The word may also on occasion mean partner or companion and is so used by Shakespeare (Barnado): "If you meet Horatio and Marcellus, The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste."22 To say to a person that he acted in certain respects like a goat might sound rather discourteous-to say that he is capricious sounds more genteel; it is the same thing onlywell it is different. The word comes from the Latin through the Italian "capriccio"-goat like, or full of the goat, which in turn comes from the Latin "caper," a he-goat. Capricious would mean full of the goat, to act like a goat, to be unsteady, changeable; apt to change one's opinions suddenly. You need not go to the Alps to watch the capers of a caper, you can see him performing the same antics while he is feeding on the scant herbage and on the prosaic and proverbial tin-cans of a vacant lot. And so one can readily see the similarity between the actions of a goat and a capricious person. The goat will take a nibble of grass at this place and suddenly jump to another place for still another nibble; a capricious person will change his opinions just as suddenly and as arbitrarily. There is no telling what either will do or where either will be the next moment. Things may be ordinary, commonplace, or even vulgar, and as such they may be found anywhere, especially at a point 22 Hamlet, L 1, 12. where three roads meet: tres and viae-a cross-road. Trivial matters are so commonplace that they can be found where three roads meet. Some of us may remember a country cross-road with a tavern on one corner, a blacksmith-shop on another and a country-store on the third. Here there was gossip a plenty, swapping of stories and commonplace talk on the most trivial and most weighty subjects, ranging from a thunderblast on tobacco to a dissertation on the Lord's Prayer. A different place to hear such edifying talk now is a barber-shop. There is, however, another theory as to the derivation of trivial; namely, that it is from "trivium," the first three liberal arts-grammar, rhetoric and logic-in the schools of the Middle Ages. But the modern idea and use of the word can surely not come from this meaning of trivium, unless the trivium in comparison was considered of so much less importance than the quadrivium - arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy-and therefore of less consequence, and naturally trivial. A person who is delirious is figuratively out of the furrow, from "de," out of, and "lira," a furrow. A person thus affected does not travel in the straight and narrow groove which marks a furrow; he gets out of the furrow in ploughing and makes balks. Just as he wanders out of the furrow in ploughing, so he may wander in mind out of the groove in which a normal person is accustomed to travel. So he is crazy, doting-and this was one of the first uses of the word -he is mad, he is insane, he is beside himself; and to say he is beside himself is equally as figurative and suggestive as to say he is delirious. One may cancel an order, or work certain problems in mathematics by canceling or striking out or by removing common factors in the dividend and in the divisor, or in the numerator and denominator of fractions, etc. The operation in either case is performed by drawing lines through the terms, sometimes in the form of a cross, hence cancellation. You do the same thing when you cancel an order or a document. The whole operation when completed presents a design similar in appearance to the lattice work under your porch. The Latin "cancellus" means a bar, whence French Chancel, and also the German word Kanzel-a pulpit. The plural "cancelli" is used to denote lattice work. And by the way, the chancellor was he who originally stood behind a latticed barrier. Some problems in algebra are best solved by the method of elimination. In this process of solving two unknown quantities, one of them is turned over the threshold out-of-doors -"e," out of, and "limen," the threshold, the door-sill. Other problems again are solved by Calculus, from the Latin "calculus" a small stone or pebble. As the ancient Romans reckoned by these, like the counting frames in the lower schools, and perchance the abacus by means of which the Chinaman still counts up your laundry bill, the terms calculate, calculation, and calculus were applied to the counting up of a sum. Thus even a prosaic and matter-of-fact subject like mathematics has its figurative terms, its faded metaphors. Though defalcation is in the main only a banking term, and one found usually on negotiable papers, there is back of this somewhat hardened commercial term a beautiful quaint picture. Whoever has read the expressed conditions and orders on a promissory note will probably have noticed the warning "without defalcation," little dreaming of the great contrast between the original, literal meaning and the figurative. There is back of this callous business term the picture of a field of ripened grain, ripe unto the harvest, and to be cut in the quaint and primitive way with the sickle -Latin "falx," "falcis" — a sickle, hence defalcare, to cut away, to abate, to deduct, as it were, with the sickle. It would indicate a fraudulent deficiency in money matters brought about by deducting, or cutting off some of the amount by one who has the trust or management of funds belonging to others. We fain would see no darker picture of the word as we now use it. We all have our afflictions and distressful moments, our trials and tribulations. After having passed through a stage of affliction and tribulation we are supposed to have become cleansed and purified in life and character. The ancient Romans had a "tribulum," a sledge consisting of a wooden block filled with pieces of flint or iron teeth; with this they separated the corn from the husks, or beat the wheat from the chaff. This contrivance served the same purpose as the English threshing flail. The act of this separation was designated by "tribulatio." As troubles and afflictions are the means appointed by a divine guidance for separating the chaff from the wheat in our natures, some early Christian writer by a rustic metaphor called these trials and afflictions tribulations. And thus have we the chaff beaten out of our nature by this threshing flail of trouble. And here we are constrained to quote several lines from a poem by George Wither, a prolific writer of the 17th century-a fine unfolding of this single idea. "Till from the straw the flail the corn both beat, Until the chaff be purged from the wheat, Yea, till the mill the grains in pieces tear, The richness of the flour will scarce appear. So, till men's persons great afflictions touch, If worth be found, there worth is not so much, Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet That value which in threshing they may get," etc. We have found no more beautiful and effective faded metaphor than this. And long after the sand in the arena has ceased to be stained with human blood from gladiatorial combats, and long after the cordage has ceased to creak on the Roman battle-ships we are told that this or that man has distinguished himself in the arena of debate or on the rostrum. Who will dare to say that there is such a thing as a dead language, or even a dead word? Henry David Thoreau-A Pioneer in the J Field of Education HARRY ELMORE HURD, HAVERHILL, MASS. ULIUS CAESAR lifted his eyes from the circle voice, Caesar said, "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look: He thinks too much: such men are dangerous." If thinking makes men dangerous, beware of Henry David Thoreau, the narrow-chested Concord seer, "lean as a wolf!" Like Socrates, Thoreau went about stabbing men awake. He was a "three-story brain with skylight" (as Oliver Wendell Holmes would put it), a "calm Nietzsche." It is for some Otto Heller to point out the intellectual kinship of Thoreau and Nietzsche as he has done of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose face has been saved by the fact that few men read or understood him after his death. Mr. Heller says, "In fact Emerson goes to such an extreme of individualism that the only thing that has saved his memory from anathema is that he has not many readers in his after-times, and these few do not always venture to understand him." It is significant that after Nietzsche became popular, Thoreau was translated into German, in 1897. Thoreau says, "The maker of me was improving me. When I detected this interference I was profoundly moved. For years I marched as to a music in comparison with which the military music of the streets is noise with discord. . . . Let a man step to the music which he hears, however measured." He wishes to give plenty of time for growth: more than for an apple tree or an oak. Drifting down the Merrimack River, he says, "A man cannot wheedle nor overawe his Genius. . . . These winged thoughts |