ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 251 



in learning the foreign ones, and most of all in the dead 

 ones, which now cease to be popular, and are only pre 

 served in books. 



We divide grammar also into two parts literary and 

 philosophical; the one employed simply about tongues 

 themselves, in order to their being more expeditiously 

 learned or more correctly spoken, but the other is in some 

 sort subservient to philosophy; in which view Caesar wrote 

 his books of Analogy, 9 though we have some doubt whether 

 they treated of the philosophical grammar now under con 

 sideration. We suspect, however, that they contained noth 

 ing very subtile or sublime, but only delivered precepts of 

 pure and correct discourse, neither corrupted by any vulgar, 

 depraved phrases, and customs of speech, nor vitiated by 

 affectation; in which particular the author himself ex 

 celled. Admonished by this procedure, I have formed in 

 my thoughts a certain grammar, not upon any analogy 

 which words bear to each other, but such as should dili 

 gently examine the analogy or relation between words and 

 things, yet without any of that hermeneutical doctrine, or 

 doctrine of interpretation, which is subservient to logic. 

 It is certain that words are the traces or impressions of 

 reason; and impressions afford some indication of the body 

 that made them. I will, therefore, here give a small sketch 

 of the thing. 



And first, we cannot approve that curious inquiry, which 

 Plato however did not contemn, about the imposition and 

 original etymology of names, 10 as supposing them not given 

 arbitrarily at first, but rationally and scientifically derived 

 and deduced. This indeed is an elegant, and, as it were, 

 a waxen subject, which may handsomely be wrought and 

 twisted; but because it seems to search the very bowels 

 of antiquity, it has an awful appearance, though attended 

 with but little truth and advantage. But it would be a 

 noble kind of a grammar, if any one, well versed in numer- 



9 Suetonius Life. 10 Cratyl. 



