70 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE, (VoL. VI. 
not distinguish feminines, and behind that a still older state of affairs 
that shows no distinction for gender. If this be the case, the primary 
distinction for gender would be a distinction between the genders that 
we call masculine and neuter, and the feminine gender would be a later 
development. The distinction would, in the beginning, have nothing to 
do with sex, and the notion of sex would be connected with it only 
when the feminine gender was developed. What, then, would be the 
idea underlying the distinction between the two older classes of words? 
The grammarians of our day seem to think that to suppose that any 
idea underlies such a distinction is to introduce a dangerous element of 
speculation into a grammatical enquiry. Let me quote here the eulogy 
recently pronounced by Max Miiller upon Rudolf von Ihering : “It was 
the leading principle of all his brilliant researches to discover in 
everything that has become formal its original substance, in what 
seems unmeaning its true purpose, in what is irrational its original 
raison a étre. This is the only principle that guides, or ought to guide, 
the student of language. He has always to try to discover in what is 
purely formal in language something that was in its origin full of life 
and meaning. He has to start with the conviction that there can be 
nothing in language that had not an intelligible purpose; that there is 
nothing that is now irregular that was not at first regular, nothing 
irrational that was not originally rational.’* What is, then, the 
intelligible purpose that underlies this distinction? Grammarians have 
long felt that sancupium, a slave, was neuter, because it signified a ves 
or chattel, not a person; that is to say, they based the grammatical 
distinction between masculines and neuters not on any distinction of sex, 
but upon a distinction which was the basis of the structure of Roman law, 
that between the ves and the persona. Have we any right to suppose 
that conceptions of Roman law are based on the facts of life among the 
primitive Indo-Europeans? Ihering, in his Vorgeschichte der Indo- 
Europaer, shows, it seems to me, in a most convincing way, that many 
Roman religious and legal usages can be understood only when related 
to the conditions of life of the Indo-Europeans in their primitive habits 
or during their migrations; and speaking of the Romans, “ No other 
of the Indo-European peoples,” he says, “ have so scrupulously retained 
the institutions of primitive times as solemn religious acts, even long 
after they had lost their place in private life”’ Probably it was this 
scrupulous conservation of primitive usages that specially fitted the 
Roman people to become the creators and teachers of law for the rest 
of the world. The distinction between persona and res, which Ihering 
*In Cosmopolis, Sept., 1896. 
