are gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves.— J. S. Mill. The two races soon came to be distinguished from one another.-J. R. Green. How do the mind and the universe communicate with one another, and what security have we that they find each other out?-Martineau.

8. Either and Neither.-Either and neither, if held to their etymology, could be employed only where two things are spoken of. And we are told, "Either and neither applied to any number more than one of two objects is illegitimate and ungrammatical." "When more than two things. are referred to, any and none should be used instead of either and neither."

Any and none are proper in such cases; but either and neither have chipped the shell of their etymology, and are also proper where " more than two things are referred to.” This extension of their application goes back to the AngloSaxon, and is not, as we are told, "of late introduction."

Neither of the three competitors would have a chance against her.— Higginson. Fish, flesh, fowl, and substances that were neither.—Burroughs. The tense employed at the outset was neither past, present, nor future, but all of these combined, doing duty as either.—Whitney. Dryden, Pope, and Wordsworth have not scrupled to lay a profane hand on Chaucer, a mightier genius than either.-G. P. Marsh. A man may use it as trustingly and as soberly as he would use either of these [gravitation, light, and electricity].—Phelps. The author of either of the Three Parts of King Hen. VI.-R. G. White. Is it possible that neither of these causes [he had just given six], that not all combined could blast this bud of hope?-Edward Everett. As may be observed in either of his four Pastorals.-Stedman. If all or either of us [myself, wife, and dog] miscarry in the journey.—Ben Jonson.

We have found more than thirty sentences like the above. The use of either and neither, as conjunctions, with more than two nouns-as in the above quotation from Whitney,

and in this from Huxley, "I cannot verify it either by touch or taste or smell or hearing or sight "-is exceedingly common. And this employment of either and neither has likewise been put under ban.

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9. None. None (Anglo-Saxon ne an, not one) is not used before a noun. "It differs from no as mine from my." Mason says, " Its substantive use as a singular is becoming obsolete; and Professor Meiklejohn says, "None is always plural." Others claim that none is anchored to its etymology, and so is properly used only in the singular. But if usage furnishes the standard, both of these dicta are misleading. Often the context leaves it questionable whether none is singular or plural; but of our collected instances, in none of which is the number of none in doubt, about four-sevenths are in the singular.

None of those who inhabited it are now among the living.— Webster. None of our words in common use are new formations.-Bain. Where none admire, 'tis useless to excel; where none are beaux, 'tis vain to be a belle.-Lyttleton. None are more likely to study the public tranquility.-Irving. None of us will risk his life-Burke. There was none to which I more frequently gave a meditative hour.-Everett. None hears thy voice right, now he is gone.-Matthew Arnold. There is none like her.-Tennyson.

CHAPTER VII.

GRAMMATICAL CHANGES OF THE ANGLO-SAXON IN BECOM ING ENGLISH.-THE VERB.

THE OLD, OR STRONG, ANGLO-SAXON CONJUGATION.

THE NEW, OR WEAK, CONJUGATION.

Endings of the Present Tense.

XXIV. How the Two Conjugations Arose. The original Indo-European method of indicating completed action, action. in past time, was repetition of the root. This naturally denoted that the act expressed by this syllable was finished. These two syllables tended to run together, and in the contraction resulting, especially in the Teutonic member of the family, the radical vowel was changed. This change, incidental and euphonic at first, came to be regarded as in itself a sufficient sign of past time.

But in different verbs the vowels or diphthongs resulting from the contraction differed, and something less "irregular

and seemingly capricious" was needed. This need was finally met by affixing did, the reduplicated preterite of do, to the verb; and this did, running down in Anglo-Saxon to de, and in English to ed, came at length to form the preterite, or past tense, of most verbs in these two languages. Those verbs in which this vowel-change, resulting from reduplication, was looked upon as sufficiently indicative of past action or state constitute the conjugation termed strong -strong, because the verbs in it are able to form the past tense without the aid of another verb; those which for this purpose invoke the help of did constitute the conjugation called weak. Since most verbs in Anglo-Saxon and in English fall into this last class, these are also called regular," and those, "irregular."

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XXV. Wherein the Conjugations Agree and Wherein they Differ. We have set down the endings of only two tenses, the present and the past. And this because these are the only tenses in which the verb has endings to indicate person and number in the several modes.

The two conjugations agree perfectly in other tenses, and in one of the two whose endings are given above. Verbs in the two conjugations have in the present the same terminations, singular and plural, in the indicative and in the subjunctive, and the same infinitive and participle endings.

The two conjugations differ only in the past tense, and here only in two particulars, (1) the strong changes the radical vowel to indicate tense, while the weak employs d; and (2) the endings of the strong in the indicative and the participle are not quite the same as those following the din the weak.

XXVI. Loss of Verbs from the Strong Conjugation.—In his English Past and Present, Trench sorrowfully descants upon