GESSNER HARRISON, M.D., PROFESSOR OF ANCIENT LANGUAGES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. ASTOR NEW-YORK NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-two, by HARPER & BROTHERS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. ૉ. PREFACE. 1 NUMBER of years ago, viz., in the year 1839, the author of the ensuing pages was induced to have printed privately a small work, embracing the substance of part of a course of lectures which he annually delivered to his classes on the general doctrines of the etymology, and on the inflectional forms and some parts of the syntax of the Latin language. Causes beyond his control prevented him from then carrying out his original design of adding another part; and the task, thus laid aside, was never resumed. The work to which reference has been made being intended merely to aid the hearers of the writer's own lectures, a few copies only were printed. These having been long since exhausted, and the work, besides being called for by the wants or the convenience of his pupils, having met with the approbation not only of some learned men among his personal friends, whose opinion he highly valued, but of some, also, whose accurate scholarship and sound judgment he knew, without having the pleasure of their personal acquaintance and friendship, the author prevailed upon himself to reprint it, and, at the same time, having found publishers willing to undertake the issue of a book promising little, if any, pecuniary reward, to offer it to the public. To make it somewhat more worthy of any attention it may receive from the reader, the portion before printed has been revised, and in a considerable measure re-written; and an additional chapter has been introduced, devoted to the structure and signification of the verb. The time which the author could devote to the task which he assigned himself being very limited, he can not 1 indulge the hope that he has escaped avoidable faults either in the form or substance of what he has written. Yet he has not ventured to publish hastily-formed opinions, nor such as he does not, in his humble judgment, think worthy of being placed before the reader. And although he is conscious that in aiming to state his views and the grounds of them succinctly, and without always elaborately unfolding them, he may have made his pages too condensed for hasty readers, he hopes that no careful student, who deems the subject worth serious consideration, will find the reading either difficult or wholly unprofitable. The work is not designed to take the place of the systematic practical grammars, either large or small; but aims rather, if it may be permitted the writer to say so much, to come in to the aid of both, and to set forth a rational arrangement and explanation of some of the more prominent phenomena in the inflections and syntax of the Latin language. If successful in accomplishing its object, it will be a contribution, however limited and humble, to the scientific exhibition of the facts and principles belonging to these two departments of the grammar. Yet to suppose that the writer did not intend these pages to be a practical aid in the acquisition of a knowledge of the language, would be wholly to misinterpret his views. The very object at which he has aimed is to guide the student to eminently practical results. This he has striven to reach by appealing more to his observation and reason, and less to his memory; by encouraging him in the difficult and seemingly endless task of mastering the thousand special rules for the use of the language, by an attempt to show him how a multitude of these may often be reduced to a common principle; by thus assisting him, at the same time that the memory is relieved of part of a burden heavy to bear, to gain both a clearer and a more comprehensive view of the laws which govern the inflection of words and of the mutual relations of the various parts of discourse, and enabling him to discover order and harmony where he may have before seen only confused heaps of incongruous materials; and, lastly, by accustoming him to study the language as a branch of the inductive philosophy, and so securing the best discipline of the mind, together with the safest and largest useful results. The experience of many years spent in the practical duties of teaching has satisfied the author that more may be taught in this way in the same time, and more accurately, at least to those who have some maturity of mind; and, what is of infinitely more moment than any mere accumulation of knowledge, that the student, meantime, acquires a sharpness of attention, a carefulness of observation, and a desire thoroughly to comprehend the relations of things, that can not fail to be fruitful of good to an amount that empirical methods can never attain. Although this work is not designed for beginners, yet, assuming it to be true that the same general doctrines that form the last results of scientific inquiry, and that constitute the base of the most perfect system of truths in any department of knowledge, should comprehend the earliest teachings as well as the last, and that the method of the first and simplest acquisitions should, in kind at least, be the same with the latest and most complicate; in a word, if a beginner should, according to his strength and capacity, be so taught that what he learns, and the way in which he learns it, shall be of a piece with his after acquirements, and in harmony with the modes of investigation which a true philosophy and the study of maturer years demand, then the writer would humbly hope that what he offers, if it contain valuable truth, may not be unacceptable or useless to teachers even of the first elements. The only apology which the author deems it necessary to offer for the liberty which he has taken of departing from the usual arrangement, and of connecting what he had to say of the syntax with the inflectional forms, will be found |