Professor Blackie read a paper on Onomatopoeia, or the influence of the imitative principle on the formation of language. Without denying that a number of words in the later development of language were purely notional, that is, intended to represent an idea, not to imitate a sound, he strongly contended, that the whole original stock of language was either direct imitations of natural sounds, or analogical representations of things visible and tangible by things audible. As proofs of this he adduced various illustrations from the Aryan and the Semitic languages.