218 ADVANCEMENT OP LEARNING. [bOOK VL 



enjoyments it lost through its own default. Thus it guards 

 against the first general curse, the sterility of the earth, and 

 the eating our bread in the sweat of the brow, by all the 

 other arts ; as against the second, the confusion of languages, 

 it calls in the assistance of grammar. Though this art is of 

 little use in any maternal language, but more serviceable in 

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

 which now cease to be popular, and are only preserved in 

 books. 



We divide grammar also into two parts,— literary and philo- 

 sophical ; 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,^ 

 though we have some doubt whether they treated of the 

 philosophical grammar now under consideration. "We suspect, 

 however, that they contained nothing very subtile or sublime, 

 but only delivered precepts of pure and correct discourse, 

 neither corrupted by any vulgar, depraved phrases, and cus- 

 toms of speech, nor vitiated by affectation ; in which parti- 

 cular the author himself excelled. 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 diligently examine the analogy or relation 

 betwixt words and things, yet without any of that hermeneu- 

 tical doctrine, or doctrine of interpretation, which is sub- 

 servient 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,'^ 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 



» Suetonius'a Life. '' Cmtyl 



