ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 29 



Thirty-Third Regular Meeting, February i, 1881. 



The President, Major J. W. Powell, delivered his annual address 

 On Limitations to the Use of some Anthropologic Data. 1 



Thirty-Fourth Regular Meeting, February 15, 1881. 



Mr. Henry L. Thomas read a paper On Some Peculiarities 

 in the use of Moods in the Principal Neo-Latin Languages. 

 The following is an abstract : 



The object of the paper was to illustrate various points of com- 

 parison existing in the use of the moods in the principal Neo-Latin 

 languages. Mr. Thomas referred, in the first place, to the meagre 

 degree of attention which has been given to the subject of the 

 accurate use of the moods by the Italian grammarians, and the 

 devotion with which almost all of them continue to regard the 

 usage of Boccaccio and the writers of that period. He next called 

 attention to the service rendered to the Italian language of the 

 present day by Giuseppe Rigutini, a citizen of Florence, who has 

 done much for the promotion of stylistic purity by the publication 

 of his Vocabulary of the Spoken Language, a work which marks 

 an epoch in Italian lexicography, inasmuch as the author, boldly 

 striking out into a new path, has had the courage to disregard the 

 usage of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and to accord a scientific treat- 

 ment to the language of to-day. 



Many examples were adduced with a view to presenting a kind 

 of parallel view of the use of the moods (principally the subjunc- 

 tive) in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. A few examples 

 of the use of the French subjunctive, as exhibited in writings a 

 little more than two hundred years old, were given to show that 

 this mood was then used (or that its use was at least allowable) in 

 connection with verbs of thinking and believing, in affirmative sen- 

 tences, and the fact was adverted to that that practice no longer 



1 Loc. cit.t pp. 1 1 3-1 36; also in "Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology," 

 1879-80, pp. 71-86. 



