62 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL. VI. 
language. So when the poet speaks of the bird seeking “er nest, or the 
leap of “the roe when Ze hears in the woodland the voice of the hunter,” 
or of the swan singing er death song, he is determined in his choice of 
genders neither by the gender of these words in the English of to-day, 
for then they are usually neuter, nor by the gender they have in Anglo- 
Saxon, where the words for bird and swan are masculine, while that for 
roe is feminine, but by a sense of fitness that is a law unto itself. In 
English, then, the grammatical distinction of gender has mainly disap- 
peared, and where it does exist, is applied in what seems a natural and 
rational manner, especially if we accept Paul’s opinion that the basis of 
srammatical gender is the distinction of sex. 
But when an Englishman crosses to the continent he finds a very 
different state of affairs in this regard. Our poets, following their sense 
of the fitness of things, make the sun masculine and the moon feminine ; 
the German does exactly the opposite. And the worst of it is that he 
does not confine his tendency for confusion, for such it may seem at first 
sight, to lifeless objects. In German the boy is masculine, it is true 
but the girl is neuter. The lady (/vaz) is feminine, but the woman 
(Wezb) is neuter. The spoon is masculine, the fork is feminine, and the 
knife is neuter; a tree is masculine, its buds are feminine, and its leaves 
are neuter; one’s mouth is masculine, but his nose is feminine, and his 
eyes and_ears are neuter. “Gretchen asks William, ‘Where is the 
turnip?’ ‘She is gone to the kitchen.’ ‘Where is the beautiful English 
girl?’ ‘It is gone to the opera” ” As Mark Twain remarks, “there is 
no apparent sense or system in the distinction,” and a German might 
well be pardoned for inquiring about the origin of a distinction that 
seems so senseless and absurd. And it must be owned that the contri- 
butions to the solution of this question have proceeded mainly from 
Germans, though it may be doubted whether their inquiries have been 
the result of any perception of the palpable absurdity of their language 
in this respect. For I well recollect the perplexity of a German girl 
who was just beginning the study of English, when she found that we 
spoke of a spoon as “it” and not “him,” and if we regard the distinction 
of genders in German from the standpoint of what seems to me the 
origin of this distinction in the Indo-European family of languages, a 
German has some reason for feeling proud of his language, as showing 
not a few traces of the origin of this distinction. 
In French the anomalies with regard to the gender of persons are far 
less marked, but here matters are complicated by the fact that the 
neuter gender has disappeared entirely, and all lifeless objects are 
