Languages, it is true, have been fluctuating, and in particular the English; which was originally the Celtic or Phrygian, brought by our ancestors, the Titans, in the first westward migration, from the lesser Asia, thro’ Greece and Italy into ancient Celtica; and which on the arrival of the Romans in Italy partook of the Greek dialects, and furnished the Romans with a considerable part of the Latin tongue. Some of the Aborigines of Italy, Spain, and Gaul, having afterwards fled from the Roman yoke into Germany, without their priests and druids, who had before retired into Britain, their language as well as knowledge received an ebb, though no foreign admixture. But their priests and bards denominated in the writings of the British poets, the Luchlin colony, and in Germany and Italy, by the names of Longobards, and Lombards, _the great bard nation_, and speaking the British language in Germany, being drove by the Romans out of Britain, into Germany and Denmark, their language as well as knowledge received some increase from the mother tongue; which then in its turn began to sink in Britain. And thus all the dialects of ancient Celtica are but different dialects of the old Celtic language, which first made its way into Europe, and so they ought to be deemed by lexicographers in their definition of vocables. But of all those dialects, the English in respect to the copiousness, strength, and simplicity both of its vocables and construction, seems to be the best fund for an universal language of any upon earth.
It may not perhaps seem improper here to explain some other abstruse principles in physics and metaphysics, from the meaning of vocables, as they too seem to explain the principles of rational grammar. There are, it seems, in physics, discoverable by the signification of words, three universal principles or genusses of things, namely, space, matter, and motion; which, as to their essences, if essence, nature, and quality differ in ought but form, are indefinable. But with respect to their modes, properties, and forms, space is distance every way, whether with or without body; with it, it is extension or capacity; without it, a vacuum; quantity, mensuration, number, place or matter extended, a continent, an island, length, breadth, figure, thickness, an inch, a foot, a yard and such things being its modes. Matter, whatever its essence may be, is an indivisible impenetrable atom or corpuscule; of which two or more assembled or cohered, form a particle, and larger cohesions or combinations of those form sensible bodies, which are chiefly distinguishable in language by their forms; though they have such properties and modes, as length, breadth, and thickness, or extension, solidity, or an assemblage excluding all other bodies from its place, divisibility or the separation of its quantity, mobility, passiveness, and figure, or that length and breadth without thickness, which present themselves to the eye. And as to the active qualities of matter, they seem to be all intentional, as fluidity, softness, rarity, heat, and other modes of motion; all the rest being passive, and arising merely from the different texture, disposition, and combination of bodies; or a privation of the former; as, firmness, hardness, density, coldness, dryness, and rest. Motion is the successive passage or change from once place or state to another. Of which there are three sorts expressible by language, viz. the energic, generative, and local; which with their various modes or actions are expressible by verbs.