I had consulted several of my own geological friends, and they all told me that there was, as yet, no evidence in Central Europe and Italy of a succession of vegetation different from that in the North, and that, in the present state of geological science, they could say no more. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I said, Let us wait and see; Professor Whitney says, Don’t wait.
His second objection is his own, but hardly worthy of him.
“The hypothesis,” he says, “assumes that the Germanic and Italic races, while they knew and named the fir-tree only, yet kept by them all the time, laid up in a napkin, the original term for oak, ready to be turned into an appellation for beech, when the oaks went out of fashion.”
This is not so. The Aryan nations formed many new words, when the necessity for them arose. There, was no difficulty in framing ever so many names for the oak, and there can be little doubt that the name φηγός was derived from φάγω, the oak tree being called φηγός, because it supplied food or mast for the cattle. If there remained some consciousness of this meaning among the Greeks, and the Italians, and Germans, then the transference of the name from the oak to the beech would become still more easily intelligible, because both the beech-nuts and the acorns supplied the ordinary mast for cattle.
Professor Whitney probably had misgivings that these two objections were not likely to carry much weight, so he adds a third.
“The hypothesis,” he says, “implies a method of transfer of names from one object to another which is totally inadmissible; this, namely—that, as the forest of firs gave way to that of oaks, the meaning of fir in the word quercus gave way to that of oak: and in like manner in the other case. Now if the Latins had gone to sleep some fine night under the shade of their majestic oaks, and had waked in the morning to find themselves patulæ sub tegmine fagi, they might naturally enough have been led, in their bewilderment, to give the old name to the new tree. But who does not see that, in the slow and gradual process by which, under the influence of a change of climatic conditions, one species of tree should come to prevail over another, the supplanter would not inherit the title of the supplanted, but would acquire one of its own, the two subsisting together during the period of the struggle, and that of the supplanted going out of use and memory as the species it designated disappeared?”
This objection was of course so obvious that I had thought it my duty to give a number of instances where old words have been transferred, not per saltum, but slowly and gradually, to new objects, such as musket originally a dappled sparrow-hawk, afterwards a gun. Other instances might have been added, such as θάπτω, the Sanskrit dah, the latter meaning to burn, the former to bury. But the best illustrations are unintentionally offered by Professor Whitney himself. On p. 303 he alludes to the fact that the names robin and blackbird have been applied in America, for the sake of convenience, and under the government of old associations, to birds essentially unlike, or only superficially like, those to which they belong in the mother country. Of course, every Englishman who settled in America knew that the bird he called robin was not the old Robin Redbreast he knew in England. Yet the two names co-existed for a time in literature, nay, they may still be said to co-exist in their twofold application, though, from a strictly American point of view, the supplanting American bird has inherited the title of the supplanted Cock-Robin of England.
Now, I ask, was there anything in these three cheap objections that required an answer? Two of them I had myself fully considered, the third was so flimsy that I thought no one would have dwelt on it. Anyhow, I felt convinced that every reader was competent to judge between Professor Whitney and myself, and it certainly never entered my mind that I was in honor bound, either to strike out my chapter on the Words for Fir, Oak, and Beech, or to fight.
Was I then so far wrong when I said that Professor Whitney cannot understand how anybody could leave what he is pleased to call his arguments, unheeded? Does he not express his surprise that in every new edition I adhere to my views on Fir, Oak, and Beech, though he himself had told me that I was wrong, and when he calls my expressed desire for real criticism a mere “rhetorical flourish,” is this, according to the opinion of American gentlemen, or is it not, abuse?