Webster, that "when the Doctor was asked how many words he had coined for his Dictionary, he replied, only one, to demoralize, and that not for his dictionary, but in a pamphlet published in the last century." (B.) Since then the word has become a great favorite in the United States, and is used on every occasion that will furnish a pretext for its employment. Hence the well-known anecdote of the Southern soldier in the late Civil War, who was found at the bottom of a ditch during the battle of Gettysburg, and when picked up for dead, piteously informed General Lee that he was not hurt, nor scared, but "terribly demoralized." The term department has here the special meaning of one of the principal branches of government, the Treasury, War, Navy, etc., with a Secretary at the head of each, corresponding to the ministers of continental monarchies. Here departmental business is transacted by a number of clerks, who for the sake of greater efficiency and method are distributed among so many bureaux, in each of which again a subdivision of departmental business is performed. In another connection we find the name of the royal Bourbons applied, now politically to any old-fashioned party which acts unmindful of past experience, and now as a trade-term to a superior kind of whiskey distilled in the county of Bourbon, in the State of Kentucky, or to successful imitations. Pelage is still heard in the West, as it was in the days when Bacon used it, to designate certain furs; thus sea-otters are described as having a "fur much lighter inside than upon the surface, and extending over all are scattering, long, glistening hairs, which add much to the richness and beauty of the pelage." (Overland Monthly, Jan. 1870, p. 25.) The French robe, on the other hand, is limited to the skin of a buffalo, while those of other animals are simply called skins. They are brought in packs of robes, ten being tied together, to the great fur markets, and thus a "coachman sat on the high box in splendid livery, with a costly buffalo robe thrown carelessly over his knees." (New York Herald, Jan. 9, 1870.)

Other French words, like promenading, instead of simply walking; prestige for a peculiar influence more felt than enforced; and portemonnaie, for a compact money-purse, are probably not more common in America than in England; and when a writer says of the mouth of the Mississippi: "Here and there, shaded by a

graceful group of bananas, is a latanier hut with adobe walls, and a roof thatched with the fan-shaped leaf of the palmetto" (Putnam's Mag., May, 1868), he would have been better understood in both countries by simply saying, "Bourbon palm," instead of latanier.

The abuse of bouquet, which is commonly pronounced and often even printed boquet, is "a corruption as dissonant to the ear as were to the eye the plucking a rose from a variegated nosegay, and leaving only its thorny stem." (George H. Calvert, Popular Errors.) Even Boquet River, in Essex County, New York, has been thus contaminated. The hope that it might derive its name from Colonel Boquet, who encamped on its banks with a British force in the colonial time, has failed; since it has been ascertained, from a letter written years before, that the correct name, Bouquet River, was given it from the flowers on its banks, which to this day make it one of the most lovely and romantic of American rivers.

Nor have proper names of persons been able to protect themselves against the overwhelming power with which the English language absorbs all foreign words, as the English character absorbs other nationalities. Frenchmen and French Canadians who came to New England, had to pay for such hospitality as they there received, by the sacrifice of their names. The brave Bon Cour, Captain Marryatt tells us in his Diary, became Mr. Bunker, and gave his name to Bunker's Hill of famous memory; Pibaudière was changed into Peabody, Bon Pas into Bumpus ; and the "most unkindest cut of all," the haughty de l'Hôtel, became a genuine Yankee under the guise of Doolittle.

A curious form under which French still continues in Louisiana and some of the riparian counties on the Mississippi, is the Creole-French, a dialect or patois, consisting in the main of strangely disguised and disfigured French words, with an admixture of some English and a few genuine African terms. Its grammar has been written, and the learned librarian of Yale College, Mr. Van Name, has examined it philologically with great success. As it is rapidly passing away, a stanza of a popular Coonjai (congé), or Minuet, well known to Louisiana planters, may not be out of place here :

"Mo déjà roulé tout la côte,

Pancor (pas encore) ouar (voir) pareil belle Layotte, Mo roulé tout la côte,

Mo roulé tout la colonie,

Mo pamor ouar grifforme là,

Qua mo gôut comme la belle Layotte."

THE SPANIARD.

"He has no Savey."

Mark Twain.

THE Spaniards have been so long masters in Mexico and Florida, that the acquisition of the latter State, and the formation of California and the territory obtained after the Mexican war into several new States, have made our people familiar with many terms belonging to their language. They remember with deep interest that the oldest town in the United States is St. Augustine, in Florida, founded in 1565 by the Spaniards, while venerable Jamestown, in Virginia, dates back only to 1607, and Plymouth, in Massachusetts, to Governor Winthrop in 1620. Santa Rosa and Fernandina, in Florida, retain with their ancient names many a relic and ruin of Spanish days, and California is almost altogether Spanish, as far as local names and the most familiar expressions are concerned. Spanish words, especially those relating to horses and mules and to their equipments, have of late come into general use in Oregon, owing to intercourse with California.

A number of these Spanish terms bequeathed to us by the former owners of the soil, are, of course, parts of the great English language, and as well known abroad as with us, but in the great majority of cases such words have assumed here either a new form or a special meaning, which makes them more exclusively part of our own speech. Known in England only to the few, they have become with us the common property of the people, and are understood not only by the dwellers in formerly Spanish districts, but quite as well by the general reader.

Thus we owe to Spanish distinctions, made at an early period of their dominion on this continent, several of the names by which shades of color are designated in the descendants of white

and black persons who had intermarried.

Their term mulato,

from mulo, simply denoting a mixed breed, became our Mulatto, the name of a person whose parents were black and white. The name is in the United States given more loosely to any one who has white blood in him, though, strictly speaking, the offspring of a mulatto and a white man is a quadroon, or cuarteroon, as he is sometimes called by the Spanish term, and an octaroon (with an rin it which is inorganic, and has slipped in merely from a fanciful analogy to quadroon, while the proper form would be "Octoon "), is the offspring of a quadroon and a white. The latter is also sometimes called a Mustee, a term obtained from Cuba, but properly the Spanish mestizo, the child of a Spaniard and an Indian, which again produces Mustafina, the offspring of a mustee and a white, having therefore only one sixteenth of black blood in his veins. These nice distinctions have, since the emancipation, lost all the importance they had in the days of slavery, and the only interest that now attaches itself to the mulattoes especially, is the question how far they will show a superiority over the negroes, such as has been noticed in some of the West India Islands. So far two facts only have been established which bear upon this question. One is, that the mulatto is invariably a decided improvement on one of his producers, and not at all incapable of reaching the full stature of mental and moral manhood. The other is, that while an infusion of white blood thus beyond all doubt intellectualizes the black, it brutalizes the Red-man--a fact proven by the superiority of Brazil over other Spanish-American countries. In the Empire the mixture of Caucasian and negro blood has apparently not impeded progress of every kind-in the latter the fusion of European and Indian blood has produced utter and universal ruin.

The negro himself bears his first Spanish name, which simply means a black man, though the term is not often heard now in the United States, where a sickly philanthropy prefers speaking of freedmen and colored men, while contempt stigmatises them as niggers, and ludicrously as people of the "Fifteenth Amendment Persuasion," alluding to the amendment to the Constitution, which secured to them their rights of citizenship. The word nigger is, however, not to be charged to this country. In Wix's Newfoundland Missionary Journal we find: "Here we saw the