1825.] 
one of different inflexions, or essentially 
at variance with it. 
The English no longer attributes 
genders to inanimate objects, but the 
German, in this respect, is far less per- 
fect. It has three, the masculine, femi- 
nine and neuter ; for determining which, 
the rules are neither many nor difficult. 
Many apparent irregularities in this lan- 
guage may be accounted for, by con- 
sidering, that the combination of el, en, 
and er, with the terminations es and en, 
can never take place till es and en have 
dropped their e; of which rule of 
euphony, several examples will presently 
occur, 
The plural of masculine substan- 
tives ends generally in e, that of femi- 
nine in en, and that of neuter im ér. 
Wind, m. (wind), is, in the plural, winde ; 
hatze, f. (a cat), katzen; feld, n. (a field), 
felder. Except in feminines, which in 
the singular never change, the genitive 
singular ends in es or s, and the dative 
plural, in nouns of all genders, in en or 
n. In some nouns the genitive singular 
ends in ens, and in others in en; and 
then en remains throughout all the cases 
of either number, except bruders haus, 
brother’s house: knabe, boy, makes 
knabens : wind and bruder make, in the 
dative plural, winden, to winds ; bradern, 
to brothers. : 
Adjectives separated from their sub- 
stantives remain unchanged; as, sie ist 
gut, she is good; wir waren gut, we were 
good. They are compared as in Eng- 
lish :—Weis, wise; weiser, wiser; weis- 
este, wisest,—are examples of regular, 
and gut, besser, beste, of irregular com- 
parisons. 
The comparative adverb than is ren- 
dered by dann, and more usually by als, 
as, i.e. which, a word of the same nature 
with the Latin gudm, and French que, 
The numerals scarcely differ from our 
own:—LEin, one; zwey, two; drey, 
three; viér, four; dreyzehen, thirteen; 
vierzig, forty, are the least similar, 
How much the verb resembles our 
own, may be judged of by the following 
specimen. The syllables e, est, et, en, 
are the terminations of the persons in 
the present indicative, and in the pre- 
sent subjunctive also; except that in 
the latter, the third person singular is 
the same with the first, By prefixing ¢ 
to these syllables, we have the form of 
the imperfect of either mood, The pre- 
sent of zu lernen, to learn, is, Ich lerne, 
du lernest, er lernet, wir lernen, ihr 
lernet, sie lernen; the imperfeet is, Ich 
lernete or lernte, &c. The remaining 
tenses are formed by auxiliaries corre- 
Mathematical Stanza. 7 
sponding with our own. The present 
participle terminates in end, as lernend, 
learning; and the past in ¢, as gelernet, 
learned. Irregularities can occur in very 
few parts of the verb, which, too, in 
this respect, is extremely like the Eng+ 
lish. Indeed, were it not for many of 
these irregularities, the language would, 
to us, be less easy. 
The chief point of resemblance, be- 
tween the German and English grams 
mars, having now ~been considered, it 
remains to give a few specimens of the 
construction and phraseology. © The 
arrangement of the words is very much 
in the style of the scriptural language of 
our own country, and therefore little 
adapted to the purposes of conversa- 
tion; but the syntax and phrases are, 
with a few exceptions, completely Eng+ 
lish. In the four succeeding sentences, 
the order of the words is German:— 
There comes he. Now will Lit do. Here 
am I. I had my friend forgotten. 
Out of innumerable instances of idio-. 
matic agreement between the German 
and English, there remains space only 
for the following:—Sie ist gut genug, 
she is good enough, Ware Ich besser, 
were I better. Die sonne gehet unter, 
the sun gets under. Zw brechen mit 
meinem freund, to break with my friend, 
Sie ist sechzig jahr alt, she is sixty years 
old, Wir missen so und so thun, we 
must do so and so. E, D, M. 
<> 
To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine. 
Sir: 
S I suspect that the readers of your 
Miscellany have no objection to 
curious scraps ; and you yourself, per- 
haps, or your printer, may occasionally 
find them convenient to fill up a cor» 
ner at the bottom of a column, or stop 
a gap between two grayer articles, J 
send you a curious. instance of « 
MATHEMATICAL STANZA which occurs 
(though without the formal distinction, 
as here, of avowed metrical lines) in 
Whewell’s Treatise on Mechanics ; the 
detection of which has been the source 
of much amusement to the cantabs, and 
of some. annoyance to the learned 
author. 
** Hence no force, howeyer great 
Can stretch a cord, however fine, 
Tnto a horizontal line 
That is correctly strait.” 
It may be doubted whether our ac- 
complished mathematician, if he were 
to set down professedly to write in 
verse, would produce many such 
perfect stanzas, + 
