l899-'oo TRANSACTIONS IO9 



bear on a certain object, the mind became so accustomed to an accompani- 

 ment of that nature, that in course of time this addition, or complement, to 

 the verb came to be regarded as necessary to it. Then, by a mental transfer 

 which finds analogies in other fields of study, men were led to believe that they 

 felt in the words themselves that which was the mere result ot habit. Hence- 

 forth they were in possession of verbs which required a complement : the 

 transitive verb was born." 



Yes, the transitive verb was born, and an important step was 

 taken towards the establishment of that mutual dependence of 

 words on one another which is the highest characteristic of or- 

 ganized and developed human speech.* 



Nothing seems more incomprehensible at first sight than the 

 wealth of inflections possessed by such languages as Greek, I^atin 

 and Sanskrit. How did they come into existence ? How did 

 the frost pictures which we see on our window panes on cold 

 winter mornings come into existence ? They are very elaborate 

 and delicate and beautiful : one might suppose an artist 

 hand had been at work ; but if we enquire into the matter we 

 find that all is accounted for by the laws of crystallisation. In 

 the case of the inflections we have, in lieu of the laws of crystall- 

 isation, the effort or nisits of man's developing thought towards 

 definiteness, completeness, and harmony of expression. Any 

 chance addition to a word, which had in some way or other the 

 effect of causing it to be understood with a certain modification 

 or direction of meaning, might become the foundation of an inr 

 flection, and be extended by analogy to other words. f 



*In the paper as read examples were given of the development of intran- 

 sitive into transitive verbs. Some condensation being necessary in publica- 

 tion, these are here omitted. 



tM. PaulRegniaud, in his able but somewhat too dogmatic work, "Elements 

 de Grammaire Comparee duGrec et du Latin," (Paris, 1896) takes precisely this 

 view. Discussing the question of the origin of "reduplication" m Greek 

 verbs he says : "L'origine du redoublement est sans doute independante de 

 toute premeditation. II a du resulter d'abord de combinaisons phonetiques 

 naturelles ou fortuites du genre de celles qui le distinguent, et dout le caractfere 

 particulier a ete reproduit artificiellement dans la suite pour donner naissance, 

 d'aprfes les procedes analogiques que nous connaissons, k des series de formes 

 nouvelles ; et celles— ci out re9u ainsi la figure et la fonction memes dont 



