328 Report S.A.A. Advancement of Science. 



People will not give a patient hearing- to a man whom they cannot 

 understand. It may be assumed, therefore, that his hearers followed 

 Cicero's rounded periods without any consciousness of the difficulty of 

 their structure. How did they do this ? There was only one possible 

 method. The hearer's thought advanced fiom idea to idea as expressed 

 in the successive terms, each idea persisting in his consciousness more 

 or less distinctly, according to its emphasis, on to the conclusion of 

 the sentence, on reaching which the completed idea of the whole 

 sentence presented itself to his mind. 



The student must aim at acquiring a similar method of reading 

 these sentences. He will find that the framework of the sentence 

 lends him assistance. The thought proceeds in a logical order. The 

 nature of the clauses is distinctly' marked. When the earlier portion 

 of the sentence has been intelligently read, the reader will often be 

 able to anticipate the form of what is going to follow. An adverb 

 of degree or mannei', such as ita or sic, looks forward to a clause of 

 consequence. A verb of petitioning or ordering calls for an indirect 

 command. A non modo makes the reader expect sed etiam. The 

 whole grammatical scheme has, indeed, been developed to aid the mind 

 to gather the meaning of the sentence. 



