190 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 
In “The Booth Lincoln murder,” actor, correlating act and 
object (actee) are all presented; but as indicated, it is open to 
argument that “Booth” and “Lincoln” form a virtual com¬ 
pound, operating adjectively as the distinguisher of “murder”. 
In “The murder of Lincoln”, “murder” indicates again an 
act alone, the relation of actor to actee (object) being weakly 
expressed by “of”. This “of” in fully inflected languages be¬ 
comes the case-inflection of “Lincoln”, the latter word when 
thus inflected being known as an objective genitive, w T hich is 
matched by a subjective genitive in “Booth’s murder of Lin¬ 
coln.” “Murder” thus construed is rankable under (1). Yet 
the question may be raised whether the analogon of the “of” 
and that of the “ ’s” be rightly incorporated with their re¬ 
spective nouns—whether they do not rightly belong to “mur¬ 
der” itself. In Spanish a diminutive inflection belonging 
with a noun is sometimes shifted to an adjective limiting the 
noun. The present case may exhibit analogous shifting. The 
vagaries of the German separable preposition also are sugges¬ 
tive. 
With all the above examined kinds of verbal noun the highly 
inflected languages freely employ noun-inflections, but none, 
I believe, that are verbal. 
(3) The Latin gerund. In this the substantive inflection 
becomes incomplete, while a closer approximation to strictly 
verbal methods is effected in the treatment of the object. 
(4) The Latin supine. In this the substantive inflection 
further diminishes, even what survives being sometimes ranked 
as verbal. Indeed it is eminently natural that, while modern 
students of the Latin language regard these inflections as the 
signs of case, others sensed them as the signs of voice. 
The strictly verbal function of the supine is, however, not 
easy to And, unless perhaps one regard the word as expressing 
action and either actor or actee (or both), as in “Mirabile 
dictu” interpreted as “wonderful in (any one’s) telling (it),” 
or “Ire visum,” “to go for the purpose of (one’s) seeing (some¬ 
thing).” 
(5) The English form in “ing;” e. g. “Eating apples pro¬ 
motes digestion.” In this all noun-inflection commonly dis- 
