Goldwin Smith on the Jews (of which the gist--as far as it had any--was
that we had better give up reading the Bible), and in the text of which I
found the word 'tribal' repeated about ten times in every page. Now, if
'tribe' makes 'tribal,' tube must make tubal, cube, cubal, and gibe, gibal;
and I suppose we shall next hear of tubal music, cubal minerals, and gibal
conversation! And observe how all this bad English leads instantly to
blunder in thought, prolonged indefinitely. The Jewish Tribes are not
separate races, but the descendants of brothers. The Roman Tribes,
political divisions; essentially Trine: and the whole force of the word
Tribune vanishes, as soon as the ear is wrung into acceptance of his lazy
innovation by the modern writer. Similarly, in the last elements of
mineralogy I took up, the first order of crystals was called 'tesseral';
the writer being much too fine to call them 'four-al,' and too much bent on
distinguishing himself from all previous writers to call them cubic.
10. What simple schoolchildren, and sensible schoolmasters, are to do in
this atmosphere of Egyptian marsh, which rains fools upon them like frogs,
I can no more with any hope or patience conceive;--but this finally I
repeat, concerning my own books, that they are written in honest English,
of good Johnsonian lineage, touched here and there with colour of a little
finer or Elizabethan quality: and that the things they tell you are
comprehensible by any moderately industrious and intelligent person; and
_accurate_, to a degree which the accepted methods of modern science
cannot, in my own particular fields, approach.
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