Owen—Hybrid Parts of Speech. 
207 
be regarded as respective augmentations or extensions of the 
uncontinued and the one. 66 M} 
Even verbs which express an action virtually instantaneous 
are figuratively made to express an act extended over consider¬ 
able time, facilitating thus the time-coincidence of one such ac¬ 
tion with another. To illustrate, the arrival of the Humane 
Society’s agent and the single kick that I give my dog, con¬ 
sume perhaps each one of them so little time, that it is hardly 
plausible to pose them as exactly synchronizing. The difficulty 
is that of lodging my bullet in your visiting card at twenty 
paces—a difficulty relieved by stretching the target, or by sub¬ 
stituting, say, the door of the bam. Quite analogously all the 
difficulty of synchronizing kick and arrival may be met by 
spreading one or the other over considerable time. Accord¬ 
ingly, “The agent arrived while I was kicking the dog.” 
As however the amount of time consumed by an action, 
whether bona fide or imaginary, has nothing in common with 
date of occurrence, it is plainly quite irrational to rank the form 
expressive of (continuance) duration as a particular tense 
of the verb. Whether the act regarded as continuing should 
rank as any sort of variant of the act not so regarded, and 
whether correspondent verbal forms should be included in a 
single conjugation, may be examined to better advantage in 
connection with acts regarded as beginning, and acts regarded 
as ending. 
Beginning and ending form, with continuing, a categorical 
trio, apotheosized in the several aspects of the triune Hindoo 
Brahm, as Brahma the creator (beginner), Vishnu the pre¬ 
server (continuer) and Siva the destroyer (ender)—re-empha- 
sized in the classic Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos—of which the 
recognition of any member implies the recognition of the other 
two. Accordingly this inveterate analytic habit of thought ap- 
68 The kinship of number-extension and mass-extension may also he 
exhibited by nouns, the plural “fishes” indicating rather repetition of 
a type—or, say, a numerical count—while the also quasi-plural “fish” 
may be construed as indicating the more than one in the aspect rather 
of augmented bulk. Compare with “a fish”, “a dozen fishes” and “a 
barrel of fish.” 
