220 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 
enough in “You wouldn’t eat more, if you had it—Yes I 
would A 
That this tense might also appear in any of the hybrid forms 
of the verb, is obvious; that it sometimes actually does-so, is 
illustrated by the occurrence of a post-past in the Spanish sub¬ 
junctive. 
ii. 
More strictly considered, the admission of the verbal noun 
or the verbal adjective or the verbal adverb to the verbal 
inflectional system, is distinctly irrational. As previously ar¬ 
gued, these forms are only secondarily verbal. That is, their 
verbal function is confined to thought which is lateral to the 
thought with which their function is substantive or adjective 
or adverbial. As varieties, they are accordingly varieties 
rather of nouns or adjectives or adverbs than of verbs. This 
indeed is sufficiently indicated by their very names. Precisely 
as the phrase “a reddish blue” exhibts a particular shade of 
color rather as a variety of blue than as a variety of red, so 
also the phrase “a verbal adjective” exhibits a word as rather 
a variety (verbal) of the adjective than a variety (adjectival) 
of the verb. 
Accordingly, as the more completely rational exhibit of ver¬ 
bal forms<—or, say, as the proper conjugation of a verb—I nom¬ 
inate a system containing only the various tenses of the in¬ 
dicative mode, each tense exhibiting its several person and 
number forms. 
The forms of the verbal noun, excluded from this system, 
might be exhibited as variants of the noun. 74 Better still they 
would rank as an altogether independent system. The like 
would be true of the verbal adjective forms and the single 
form of the verbal adverb. 
Siuch an arrangement would in one particular conform the 
policy of language science to that of other sciences, for instance 
Botany and Zoology—the policy, I mean, of multiplying gen- 
74 “Striking” for instance would rather rank with the substantive 
“stroke” than with “I strike.” 
