Again, you speak of a person as 'capricious,' or as full of 'caprices.'
But what exactly are caprices? 'Caprice' is from _capra_, a goat.
[Footnote: The etymology of _caprice_ has not been discovered yet; the
derivation from _capra_ is unsatisfactory, as it does not account for
the latter part of the word.] If ever you have watched a goat, you will
have observed how sudden, how unexpected, how unaccountable, are the
leaps and springs, now forward, now sideward, now upward, in which it
indulges. A 'caprice' then is a movement of the mind as unaccountable,
as little to be calculated on beforehand, as the springs and bounds of
a goat. Is not the word so understood a far more picturesque one than
it was before? and is there not some real gain in the vigour and
vividness of impression which is in this way obtained? 'Pavaner' is the
French equivalent for our verb 'to strut,' 'fourmiller' for our verb
'to swarm.' But is it not a real gain to know further that the one is
to strut _as the peacock does_, the other to swarm _as do ants_? There
are at the same time, as must be freely owned, investigations, moral no
less than material, in which the nearer the words employed approach to
an algebraic notation, and the less disturbed or coloured they are by
any reminiscences of the ultimate grounds on which they rest, the
better they are likely to fulfil the duties assigned to them; but these
are exceptions. [Footnote: A French writer, Adanson, in his _Natural
History of Senegal_ complains of the misleading character which names
so often have, and urges that the only safety is to give to things
names which have and can have no meaning at all. His words are worth
quoting as a curiosity, if nothing else: L'experience nous apprend, que
la plupart des noms significatifs qu'on a voulu donner a differens
objets d'histoire naturelle, sont devenus faux a mesure qu'on a
decouvert des qualites, des proprietes nouvelles ou contraires a celles
qui avaient fait donner ces noms: il faut donc, pour se mettre a l'abri
des contradictions, eviter les termes figures, et meme faire en sorte