64 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [Vou. VI. 
learn grammar. The lesson begins .with metres or measures, and 
Strepsiades is eager to learn about them, for the flour-dealer has recently 
cheated him of a couple of quarts of flour. But he is disappointed to 
find that it is all about trimeters and tetrameters, dactyls that are not 
fingers, and such stuff, and returns to his request for the dd:zos Adyos. 
“But there are other things you must learn before this,” says Socrates ; 
“of four-footed beasts which are properly male.” ‘Why, I know the 
males,” he replies, “unless I have lost my senses; there are the ram, 
the bull, the dog, the cock (dAextpudy).” “You see what befalls you,” 
rejoins Socrates; “the hen you call diexzpvd», and the cock you give 
the same name.” “ How, indeed? Tell me how.” “ You call them both 
ahextpvdy,” “Ay, by Neptune; and now how should I call them?” 
“The female adextpbava, and the male 4iéztwp.” Strepsiades is delighted 
and promises to fill Socrates’ kneading-trough with flour. But he has 
made another blunder, he makes zépdoz0s the kneading-trough feminine, 
while it is masculine by ending, and so he is instructed to say zapddzy, 
because that is the way to form feminines. Such was the ridicule that 
not unnaturally assailed the first attempt to reform syntax on logical 
principles. 
Thus the nature of gender seems to have been the first question in 
grammar that engaged the attention of the Greeks, and Protagoras had 
no doubt that it was based on the distinction of sex in men and animals, 
in which view he is followed by all the Greek and Roman grammarians : 
Dionysius Thrax in the oldest z¢yvy ypaypyatixy or art of grammar, that 
appeared in the western world,—a hand-book written in the first century 
B.C.—in three lines gives in substance all we learn from the ancient 
grammarians, I'évy pév oby ctor tpta: dposvixdy, Onhuxdy, obdétepor, Sut0e Os Tpoott- 
Ogact tobdtots GAka Obo, xowdy Te, nat extxotvov, xowoy pey oloy Ixzog xdwy, extxotvoy 
O& OLoy Yehooby aetogs. The Roman grammarians translated zoey yéevos by 
genus commune, and éxizowoy by promiscuum, and to the five genders 
mentioned above, Priscian added a sixth of nomzna mobilia ex. gr.: 
bonus-a-um or filius, filta, or the Greek Afwy,Agave, (He confuses 
adjectives with nouns and the division of the adjective asa separate part 
of speech was unknown to the ancients, being first made in the 
Middle Ages). The question that interested the Roman grammarians 
and all grammarians down to our own century was not that of the origin 
of this distinction, which seemed obvious, but how far the neuter gender 
was a natural one. Perhaps the judgment on this point best worth 
quoting is that of Julius Ceasar Scaliger, who holds that the venus 
neutrum cannot be considered a natural gender, for under it come not 
merely objects without life or sex, but living sexual things, as mancupium 
