122 brooks' ROSS. 



scliel at 452 years ; Bessel, however, from later, and perliaps more ac- 

 curate observations, concludes that it canftot be less than -540 years. — 

 Admitting the correctness of the latter estimate, the hourly motion of 

 the component stars is 31-54 miles; and since their distance from each 

 other is about fifty times that of the earth from the sun, if we suppose 

 the sum of their masses equal to the sun's mass, the lime of their rev- 

 olution, found by the third law of Kepler, would be about 353 years. 

 But since the mass is inversely as the square of the periodic time^ we 

 have (admitting their period of revolution to be 640 years,) (540)* : 

 (353)* : : 1 : Hj gff =^ the sum of their masses, that of the sua be- 

 i»g 1- 



brooks' ROSs' latin grammar. (Concluded.) 



J? Lalin Grammar — by James Ross, L. L. D., edited by N. C. Brooks, A. M., 



Professor in the Latin High School, Baltimore, Md. Philadelphia : Thomas, 

 Cowperthwait, &, Co. 



We shall only add a iew remarks upon the subject of Prosody. To 

 this part of the original work of Ross we accord a high degree of merit, 

 with the capital fault, that it was entirely in Latin. Prof Brooks has 

 rectified this by giving an English version of the whole, nor do w^e at 

 all object to his having kept the general rules in Latin. By the time 

 the student begins the study of this part of the Grammar, he will have 

 quite knowledge enough of the language to understand them, and they 

 are capital versus memonales of which he cannot acquire too many. 

 We likewise admire Ross' plan of giving the examples and exceptions 

 in Latin verse; it has not only the advantage of facilitating the reten- 

 tion of the words, which we have already mentioned, but that of making 

 the student more familiar with the subject of quantity and versification. 

 He has thus impressed upon his mind, not onlj- the quantity of the par- 

 ticular letter or syllable under consideration, but likewise the quantity 

 of ihe whole word. 



But in this part also we should desire to see some improvements 

 made. It is not as full in regard either to quantity or to metre as it 

 ought to be. Thus, under his Rule I. excep. 3, the fact that both Plau- 

 tus and Terence lengthen the i in. the first syllable oi fieri ^ is unnoticed. 

 And although it may be said that the peculiarities of authors are more 

 properly discussed in treatises particularly adapted to their works, we 

 think that the student, especially in this country where so few critical 

 editions of the classics are published, should have notice of the leading 

 facts of the case. A failure to attend to this, has made the whole sub- 

 ject of Lalin versification beyond the simplest hexameters and the Ho- 



