In such cases the presumption would naturally be in favor of making the first term the subject. Yet in poetical or highly rhetorical sentences there is sometimes a chance for difference of opinion.

The general principle to be applied seems to be that the subject represents an idea in the speaker's mind that is supposed to be unknown to the hearer or regarding which some unknown fact is to be communicated. In "The wages of sin is death," is the speaker trying to show what constitutes death, or is it the wages of sin whose character is to be revealed? If the latter, then wages of sin, being the unknown term, is the subject of the sentence.

An interrogative pronoun which introduces a question may stand either as the subject or the predicate

term.

Who will be our messenger?
James will be our messenger.
Who was Plato?

Plato was a Greek philosopher.

The answers to these questions show that who is the subject in the first interrogative sentence, but the predicate term in the second.

But there are sentences in literature in which either term might be construed as subject, though the thought would differ slightly in the two cases. In "Alfred Austin is the Poet Laureate," a change in emphasis would change the relation of the subject and predicate terms.

A similar ambiguity between the subject and the object of a verb sometimes occurs. An inversion which places the object in advance is sometimes admissible. Yet (especially if both words are nouns) it may create an uncertainty as to the true relations. In the words of Professor Bain, "It is by this construction that we can practice oracular ambiguity, as "The duke yet lives that Henry shall depose.

Several years ago the New England Journal of Education published an article by Paul Standish, giving the opinions of noted persons as to the subject and object in a well-known line of Gray's Elegy:

And all the air a solemn stillness holds.

In presenting the question to his readers, the writer says, "Don't be too positive in your reply. Wiser heads than ours differ in their opinion, and always will. If you are sure now that it is air that holds the stillness, the probability is that in five minutes you will be inclined to believe that it is stillness that holds the air and you are liable to get into a frame of mind where you have no opinion whatever on the subject."

Of seventy-six replies to this question from high authorities in the educational and literary world, thirty-nine favored stillness, twenty-six favored air, and eleven were in doubt. One noted Massachusetts judge after expressing a positive opinion, added:

"P. S.-On further reflection I am on the fence." Such instances as these may well remind the grammarian not to be over positive in his opinion. Both

interpretations may sometimes be correct. Many a writer has written sentences of larger import than he himself knew in penning them. In the discussion of the subtler questions of syntax, it is not the decision reached that is of chief importance. It is the power of thinking gained by the effort to compare and discriminate the relations of a thought that is of truest educational value.

XIII

INFLECTIONS

The old wealth of forms is now thrown aside as a dispensable burden.-SCHLEICHER.

"The exhibition of the system of English inflection must constitute the main part of an English grammar. But we are not to import unreal distinctions out of a foreign tongue or theoretical distinctions out of a system of logic."

How bare-whether too bare is another question-we have stripped ourselves.-TRENCH.

The English, which from the mode of its formation by a mixture of different tongues, has been stripped of its grammatical inflections more completely than any other European language, seems nevertheless, even to a foreigner, to be distinguished by energetic eloquence.

Yet it cannot be overlooked that this copiousness of grammatical forms [in Greek] and the fine shades of meaning which they express, evince a nicety of observation and a faculty of distinguishing which unquestionably prove that the race of mankind among whom these arose was characterized by a remarkable correctness and subtlety of thought. In the ancient languages the words with their inflections, clothed as it were with muscles and sinews, come forward like living bodies full of expression and character, while in the modern tongues the words seem shrunk up into mere skeletons.-OTFRIED MÜLLER'S LITERATURE OF GREECE.

The chief ideas now expressed by English inflection are seven: number, person, time, comparison, ownership, the

subject relation and the object relation. No one word contains all these ideas.-LEWIS.

The most elaborate system of inflection still leaves something unexpressed.-BAIN.

The Anglo-Saxon, which is the basis of the English tongue, was a highly inflected language. But the Norman Conquest, besides bringing into English a large vocabulary of new words, inaugurated the long process by which the structure of the language itself was radically changed.

It has been said that “A French family settled in England and edited the English language." Perhaps the truer statement would be that the Normans found it too much trouble to learn the Saxon inflections and so ignored them. At any rate most of the old Saxon terminations gradually disappeared, and with these some of the "governments and agreements" that depend upon inflection disappeared also. By the end of the fourteenth century the process was nearly completed, and the invention of printing during the following century established the general fixity of forms that has prevailed since that era.

Inflection is the general name for all grammatical changes in the forms of words. These changes are produced as a rule by adding various terminations to the stem or root; but changes within the words, as mouse, plural mice, are also loosely called inflections.

Inflectional phenomena are of two kinds, living and dead. Certain inflections have become fixed for specific words, but are no longer used in making new forms