1898-99. | THE ORIGIN OF GENDER. 63 
masculine or feminine. Rules are not of much help in unravelling the 
entanglement; one must try to remember the gender of each word. The 
Englishman’s Latin, that seemed so useless when he was learning it at 
school, may be of assistance to him here, though it may lead him astray 
too. For while manus is la matin and lacus is le lac, color is la couleur 
and jlos is la fleur. Then substantives neuter in Latin have become 
either masculine or feminine in French, ex.gr., saeculum is le szeécle, 
vinume is le vin, regnum le regne, trifolium le trefle, but folium is la feurlle, 
mare la mer, velum lavorle, and debittum la dette. Inold French the lack 
of harmony was much greater, but it has been partially corrected in 
modern French by the influence of classical studies. 
In Greek and Latin the confusion is in its general character much the 
same, and I need not multiply examples. The Latin words for a sword, 
gladius, masculine, and enszs, feminine, mean exactly the same thing; why 
should they differ in gender? and why should they not both be neuter ? 
The answer given by the grammars is that words ending in ws in Latin 
are usually masculine, but those ending in zs are usually feminine. But 
humus, the ground, and malus, an apple tree, are feminine, and pelagus, 
the sea, is neuter, while fzzs, a boundary, and orécs, a circle, are usually 
masculine. And in Greek the irregularity here gave rise to the first 
question about grammatical syntax that was propounded in our western 
world. - 
Protagoras of Abdera, the greatest of the sophists, was the first, so 
Aristotle tells us, to distinguish the genders of nouns, dividing them 
into ¢ppzva, Oj4ea and oxeby, and noting the agreement of the epithet or 
adjective with the substantive. But he also noted that the distinction 
was not always logical or rational. Mjs, wrath, for example, the first 
word in the Iliad is feminine. So is =7Ay= the helmet. Then, while in 
case of some animals, they had different words for the male and the 
female, e. g., A¢wy, Agauva, or at least a word to distinguish the male from 
the flock, as in zp:4s and dis, tadpog and 05s, they had usually only one 
name for both, é.g., '=zos the horse or the mare, ¢pxs the male or female 
bird, a:7¢¢ the eagle, which is masculine, regardless of sex. Then while 
most words ending in vs are masculine, some like 406; a way, 7440s a box, 
copos a coffin, 47zv00s an oil-flask are feminine. Protagoras would seem 
to have made some attempt to remedy these defects, and was ridiculed 
for this by Aristophanes in the Clouds (vv. 658 ff.) Strepsiades has 
come to Socrates, representative of the Sophists in the eyes of the 
average Athenian, and wants to learn the ddxog Adyos, or art of unfair 
pleading, that he may avoid paying his debts. He is told he must first 
