108 The Rev. Dr. Wall on the Nature, Age, and Origin of the 



either experience or reason. The authors of the inspired works which make up 

 tlie Hebrew Bible, had no knowledge of grammar ; — their ignorance of it, 

 indeed, is one of the strongest intrinsic marks of the great antiquity of that 

 sacred book ; and the case of Moses bears with particular strength upon the 

 point, as he was the most highly educated man of his day, and skilled in all the 

 learning of the Egyptians ; — while on the other hand, the Chinese continue, even 

 up to the present moment, wholly ignorant upon the subject. The latter example 

 proves that letters are indispensably requisite to a knowledge of this art ; the 

 former, that they lead to such knowledge only after the lapse of a long series of 

 years. I must defer to a subsequent occasion, as well the unfolding of these 

 examples, so as to show that I have here given a just representation of their 

 nature ; as also the reasoning connected with the view of the matter which they 

 supply, — a view which, though novel, will, I trust, be found correct, and agree- 

 ing with the real state of the case. For the present I shall confine myself to 

 adducing a case, upon the facts of which there can be little room for difference of 

 opinion ; and when those facts are brought to bear upon the point before us, they 

 will, I think, afford a convincing illustration of the great length of time that men 

 would require after the introduction among them of the use of letters, in order 

 to arrive at any degree of grammatic skill by means solely of their own efforts, 

 unaided by external instruction. 



The case to which I allude is that of the Greeks, the most ingenious nation, 

 or at any rate one of the most ingenious, of those respecting which we- have any 

 historic information ; and yet they had the benefit of alphabetic writing near 

 1 100 years before they matured their notions of grammar into a regular art. 

 For nearly such a length of time, it is computed by Sir Isaac Newton, they had 

 letters before the Christian era, and according to the commonly received system of 

 chronology this interval is much greater ; but we do not hear of the grammarians 

 as a distinct class of learned men till about the first century. The date, however, 

 of an art's arrival at completion can be more closely determined by its immediate 

 effects, than by the time of its professors first coming into notice ; and the calcu- 

 lation made upon this principle will still more forcibly lead us to the same 

 conclusion. One of the most direct as well as useful results of grammatic know- 

 ledge was the formation of dictionaries ; let us, then, endeavour to trace these 

 through their several stages of improvement, and we shall thus, I expect, be 



