70 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



who gave the book," "Brown" needs no help in showing who is meant> 

 "It," on the other hand, is in need of very much help. Without such, 

 help the word "It" is so extremely helpless, that you can hardly sup- 

 pose I designed to tell you what I meant by the use of a word so im- 

 potent. For practical purposes I may quite as well substitute its al- 

 gebraic synonym and tell you that "a; was Brown." Nor does this 

 worthless statement make any important gain in value, when I specify 

 that "x was the book-giving Brown" or "re was Brown-who-gave-the- 

 book." To add to its value, I must put the specification where it will 

 do some good. If I tell you that "ic-who-gave-the-book" or the "book- 

 giving-a?" or the "book-giving person was Brown," you learn something 

 possibly worth the effort of telling. 



The actual structure, better illustrated by "It is I who am the fastest 

 runner," is the presumable result of inattention, occurring also in the 

 following example: "Not a single one of his uncles, his aunts, his 

 nephews or his nieces were there." In the enumeration of my plurals- 

 I have simply forgotten that my subject was singular; and for that rea- 

 son I have used a plural verb. In "It is I who am," etc., the nearer "I" 

 has come between me and the remoter "It;" and I have the more 

 readily^ overlooked the true dominance of the "It," from the 

 fact that the relative commonly stands immediately after its antecedent. 

 The absurdity of the structure, so carefully indicated by the usual ex- 

 pression, is revealed by the grammatical trick of turning it end for end. 

 "I who am the best runner is (or am) it" does not tell anything that I, 

 for one, feel any impulse to declare. But "I am it (or he) who is (not 

 "am") the fastest runner" announces a claim which I might be induced 

 to enter. 



XXII. LATENT RELATIVES. 



By these I mean tlie strictly relative words which Grammar 

 has failed to recognize. To illustrate in crescendo, in ^'He lay in 

 the place in which he fell/' 'Svhich'' is clearly recognized as rel- 

 ative. In "He lay in the place where he fell/' this clearness is 

 hardly diminished, "where" being plainly synonjTuous with "in 

 which." In "He lay there where he fell," it is further felt that 

 "there" is synonj^mous with "in the place," the only sign of con- 

 fused perception being the use of the special designation "cor- 

 relatives" which seems to isolate the merely pregnant "there" 

 and "where" from the mass of word-pairs employed to exhibit 

 simultaneous factors. In "He lav where he fell," the "where"' 

 continues to be felt in its full equivalence to "there, where,"' 



