point out other remarkable instances of a tendency in the same direction, in discussing the Old-English inflections.* The Icelandic has a reflective form of the verb, used also as a passive, the characteristic of which is the consonantal ending st or z: thus the active infinitive at kalla, to call, makes the reflective kallast or kallaz. This was anciently written sc or sk instead of st, and there is no doubt that it was originally simply a contraction of the reflective pronoun sik, corresponding to our self, or more exactly to the French reflective se, so that at kallast was equivalent to to call one's self, or the French s'appeler. The form in question was at first purely reflective. It gradually assumed a passive force, and there are a few instances of its employment as such by classic writers in the best ages of that literature. In modern Swedish and Danish, it is a true passive. I dwell upon this philological fact the more, because it is one of the few cases where we can show the origin of an inflection, and it is also specially interesting as an instance of the recent development of a passive conjugation in a language belonging to a family, which, in common with most modern European tongues, has rejected the passive form altogether. Although the theories I have mentioned serve to furnish an explanation of many cases of both weak and strong inflection, there are numerous flectional phenomena which they fail to account for. We must seek the rationale of these in more recondite principles, or, in the present state of philological knowledge, confess our inability to propose

*See Lecture XVIII.

Eigi munu ver þat gera, segir Skarpheðinn þvíat fást mun annat til elldkveykna, Njála, C. 125. Eigi muni fást slíkr kostr; Fornmanna Sögur III. 73, Rauðgrani sást þá ekki. Forn. Sög. Norð. II., 244.

a solution, and we are sometimes tempted to maintain with Becker, that language, as an organism, has its laws of development and growth, by virtue of which the addition of vocal elements to the root is as purely a natural germination as the sprouting of a bud at the end of a stem or in the axilla of a leaf. No theory of agglutination or coalescence will explain the general resemblance of the genitive singular to the nominative plural in English nouns, and the like coincidence between the same cases in the masculine and feminine genders of Latin substantives and adjectives. The characteristic endings of the genders, and the identity of form between the nominative, accusative and vocative cases in the neuter gender of adjectives and substantives in both Greek and Latin are peculiarities of an equally obscure character.* Linguis

Archbishop Whately makes the following suggestion in his annotation on Lord Bacon's sixteenth essay:

"In that phenomenon in language, that both in the Greek and Latin, nouns of the neuter gender, denoting things, invariably had the nominative and the accusative the same, or rather had an accusative only, employed as a nominative when required,-may there not be traced an indistinct consciousness of the persuasion that a mere thing is not capable of being an agent, which a person only can really be; and that the possession of power, strictly so called, by physical causes, is not conceivable, or their capacity to maintain, any more than to produce at first, the system of the universe?-whose continued existence, as well as its origin, seems to depend on the continued operation of the great Creator. May there not be in this an admission that the laws of nature presuppose an agent, and are incapable of being the cause of their own observance?"

It is with diffidence that I venture any criticism on so profound a thinker and so accurate a writer as the distinguished scholar from whom I quote, but it appears to me that this view of the case supposes grammatical gender to be es sentially indicative of sex, that sex is a necessary attribute of all personality, Including that of the Deity, and that want of sex distinguishes the thing from the person. The Greeks as well as the Latins, generally at least, employed gender as a mere grammatical sign, for the names of thousands of things in both languages, are masculine and feminine, and on the other hand beings are in very many cases designated by words of the neuter gender. The words of this latter class, it is true, are generally derivatives, diminutives, and the like,

tics, as a science, is still in its infancy, and its accumulation of facts is but just begun. We shall doubtless hereafter penetrate much deeper into the mysteries of language, but yet we must resign ourselves to the conclusion, that speech, like other branches of human inquiry, will be found to have its ultimate facts, the detection of whose causative principles is beyond our reach.

but I am aware of no reason to suppose that in any stage of the Greek or Latin, whatever may have been the case in the older tongues from which they are derived, the masculine and feminine forms alone were capable of expressing personality. The neuter adjective rò eîov is used absolutely for the Divine Being or Essence, by Herodotus and by Eschylus. The chorus in the Agamemnon applies it to the inspiration of the Divinity.

1083, ΧΟ. χρήσειν ἔοικεν ἀμφὶ τῶν αυτῆς κακῶν,

μένει τὸ Θεῖον δουλίᾳ παρὸν φρενί ;

and it occurs in the sense of Divine control in the Choephori, v. 256.

κρατεῖται πως τὸ Θεῖον παρὰ τὸ μὲ

ὑπουργεῖν κακοῖς.

LECTURE XVI.

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS.

II.

THE general principle, which the philological facts stated in the last lecture serve to illustrate, is, that in fully inflected languages like the Latin, the grammatical relations, as well as many other conditions of words, are indicated by their form; in languages with few inflections, like English, by their positions in the period, and by the aid of certain small words called auxiliaries and particles, themselves insignificant, but serving to point out the connection between other words. In the proposition which was taken as an example, sheep fear man, oves timent hominem, the English words were each employed in the simplest form in which they exist in the language, without any variation for case, number or person, whereas in the corresponding Latin phrase, every word was varied from the radical, or inflected, according to its grammatical relations to other words in the period. Hence, it will be seen that for determining the relations between the constituents of a Latin period, the attention is first drawn to the inflected syllables of the words, and only secondarily, to their import. These syllables may be

called the mechanical part of grammar, because, though they probably once had an intelligible significance in themselves, yet that had been lost before Roman literature had a being, and so far back as we can trace the language, they were always, as they now are, mere signs of external relations and accidental conditions of the words to which they are applied. When the first inflected word in a Latin sentence is uttered, its relations to the entire proposition are approximately known by its ending, its ear-mark; and the mind of the listener is next occupied in sorting out of the words that follow, another, whose termination tallies with that of the first; the process is repeated with the second, and so on to the end of the period, the sense being often absolutely suspended until you arrive at the key-word, which may be the last in the whole sentence. We We may illustrate the mental process thus gone through, by imagining the words composing an English sentence to be numbered one, two, three, and so on, but to be pronounced or written promiscuously, without any regard to the English rules of position and succession. Let it be agreed that the nominative, or subject of the verb, shall be marked one, the verb two, and the objective case, or object of the verb, three. Thus, William 1, struck 2, Peter 3. It is evident that if we once become perfectly familiar with the application of the numbers, so that one instantly suggests to us the grammatical notion of the subject or nominative, two of the verb, and three of the object or objective, the numeral being in every case the sign of the grammatical category, the position of the words becomes unimportant, and it is indifferent whether I say William 1, struck 2, Peter 3, or Peter 3, struck 2, William 1. The subject, the verb, and the object remain the same in both forms, and the meaning of