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or grinding, but the root does not seem in that language to have yielded any names for mill. This may be important historically, if it should indicate that real mills were unknown previous to the Aryan separation. In Latin, Greek, German, Celtic, Slavonic, the name for mill is throughout derived from the root mar. Thus, Latin mola,1 Greek mýlē, Old HighGerman muli, Irish meile, Bohemian mlyn, Lithuanian malunas. From these close coincidences among all the members of the Northern branch of the Aryan family, it has been concluded that mills were known previous to the separation of the Northern branch, though it ought to be borne in mind that some of these nations may have borrowed the name from others who were the inventors of mills.

With the name for mill we have at the same time the names for miller, mill-stone, milling, meal. In Greek mýlos, mill-stone; mýlló, I mill. In Gothic malan, to mill; melo, meal; muljan, to rub to pieces.

What in English are called the mill-teeth are the mylitai in Greek; the molares, or grinders, in Latin.

To any one acquainted with the living language of England, the transition from milling to fighting does not require any long explanation. Hence we trace back to mar without difficulty the Homeric már-namai, I fight, I pound, as applied to boxers in the "Odyssey." 2 In Sanskrit, we find mṛi-na-mi used in the more serious sense of smashing, i. e. killing. We

1 See Pott, Etym. Forsch. (I.) i. 220. Kuhn, Indische Studien, i. 359. Curtius, G. E. i. 302.

2 Od. xviii. 31.

Ζῶσαι νῦν, ἵνα πάντες ἐπιγνώωσι καὶ οἶδε

Μαρναμένους· πῶς δ ̓ ἂν σὺ νεοτέρῳ ἀνδρὶ μάγοιο.

• Rig-Veda, vi. 44, 17 : “ prá mrina jahí cha;" strike (them) down and kill them.

shall now understand more readily the Greek môlos in mólos Áreos, the toil and moil of war, and likewise the Greek môlôps, a weal, originally a blow, a contusion.

So was mar.

Hitherto we have treated mar as a transitive verb, as expressive of the action of grinding exerted on some object or other. But most verbs were used originally intransitively as well as transitively, and What then would mar express if used as an intransitive verb, if expressive of a mere condition or status? It would mean "to be wearing away," ""to be in a state of decay," " to crumble away as if ground to dust." We say in German, sich aufreiben, to become exhausted; and aufgerieben means nearly destroyed. Goethe says, "Die Kraft der Erregbarkeit nimmt mit dem Leben ab, bis endlich den aufgeriebenen Menschen nichts mehr auf der leeren Welt erregt als die künftige;” “Our excitability decreases with our life, till at last nothing can excite the ground-down mortal in this empty world except the world to come." What then is the meaning of the Greek marainó and marasmós? Maraino, as an intransitive verb, means to wear out; as nésos maraínei me, illness wears me out; but it is used also as a neuter verb in the sense of to wither away, to die away. Hence marasmós, decay, the French marasme. The adjective môlys, formed like mōlos, means worn out, feeble, and a new verb, môlýnomai, to be worn out, to vanish.

The Sanskrit mûrchh, to faint, is derived from mar by a regular process for forming inchoative verbs; it means to begin to die.

Now let us suppose that the ancient Aryans

wanted to express for the first time what they constantly saw around them, namely, the gradual wearing away of the human frame, the slow decay which at last is followed by a complete breaking up of the body. How should they express what we call dying or death? One of the nearest ideas that would be evoked by the constant impressions of decay and death was that expressed by mar, the grinding of stone to dust. And thus we find in Latin mor-i-or, I die, mortuus, dead, mors, death. In Sanskrit, mriye, I die, mritá, dead, mṛityu, death. One of the earliest names for man was márta, the dying, the frail creata significant name for man to give to himself; in Greek brotós, mortal. Having chosen that name for himself, the next step was to give the opposite name to the gods, who were called ámbrotoi, without decay, immortal, and their food ambrosia, immortality. In the Teutonic languages these words are absent, but that mar was used in the sense, if not of dying, at least of killing, we learn from the Gothic maurthr, the English murder. In Old Slavonic we find mrěti, to die, moru, pestilence, death; smriti, death; in Lithuanian, mir-ti, to die, smertis, death.

ure,

If morior in Latin is originally to decay, then what causes decay is morbus, illness.

In Sanskrit the body itself, our frame, is called mûrli, which originally would seem to have meant decay or decayed, a corpse, rather than a corpus.

The Sanskrit marman, a joint, a member, is likewise by Sanskrit grammarians derived from mar. Does it mean the decaying members? or is it derived from mar in its original sense of grinding, so as to express the movement of the articulated joints?

The Latin membrum is memrum, and this possibly by reduplication derived from mar, like mémbletai from mélő, mémblōka from mol in émolon, the present being À bóskő.

Let us next examine the Latin mora. It means delay, and from it we have the French demeurer, to dwell. Now mora was originally applied to time, and in mora temporis we have the natural expression of the slow dying away, the gradual wasting away of time. "Sine mora," without delay, originally without decay, without loss of time.

From mar, in the secondary but definite sense of withering, dying, we have the Sanskrit maru, a desert, a dead soil. There is another desert, the sea, which the Greeks called atrýgeton, unfruitful, barren. The Aryans had not seen that watery desert before they separated from each other on leaving their central homes. But when the Romans saw the Mediterranean, they called it măre, and the same word is found among the Celtic, the Slavonic, and the Teutonic nations. We can hardly doubt that their idea in applying this name to the sea was the dead or stagnant water as opposed to the running streams (Peau vive), or the unfruitful expanse. Of course there is always some uncertainty in these guesses at the original thoughts which guided the primitive framers of language. All we can do is to guard against mixing together words which may have had an independent origin; but if it is once established that there is no other root from which mare can be derived more regularly than from mar, to die, (Bopp's derivation from the Sk. vári, water, is not tenable,) 1 Curtius, Zeitschrift, 1. 30. Slav. more; Lith. marios and marés; Goth. marei; Ir. muir.

then we are at liberty to draw some connecting line between the root and its offshoot, and we need not suppose that in ancient days new words were framed less boldly than in our own time. Language has been called by Jean Paul "a dictionary of faded metaphors" so it is, and it is the duty of the etymologist to try to restore them to their original brightness. If, then, in English we can speak of dead water, meaning stagnant water, or if the French1 use eau morte in the same sense, why should not the Northern Aryans have derived one of their names for the sea from the root mar, to die? Of course they would have other names besides, and the more poetical the tribe, the richer it would be in names for the ocean. The Greeks, who of all Aryan nations were most familiar with the sea, called it not the dead water, but thalassa (tarássó), the commotion, háls, the briny, pélagos (plázó), the tossing, pántos, the high-road.2

Let us now return to the original sense of mar and mal, which was, as we saw, to grind or to pound, chiefly applied to the grinding of corn and to the blows of boxers. The Greeks derived from it one of their mythological characters, namely, Moliōn, a word which, according to Hesychius, would mean a fighter in general, but which, in the fables of Greece, is chiefly known by the two Moliõnes, the millers, who had one body, but two heads, four feet, and four hands. Even Herakles could not vanquish them when they fought against him in defence of their uncle Augeias with his herd of three thousand oxen. He killed them afterwards by surprise.

1 Pott, Kuhn's Zeitschrift, ii. 107.
2 Curtius, Kuhn's Zeitschrift, i. 33.

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