Owen—Hybrid Parts of Speech. 
221 
era—the policy, in other words, of reducing each genus, until 
the members of each genus are unmistakably homogeneric. 
Even in linguistic science, Lexicography exhibits, at its best, 
a striking adoption of this policy. Better, it is felt, augment 
the number of meaning-groups, until each meaning-group be 
homogeneous-—containing only directly or collaterally kindred 
meanings—even though thereby the number of meaning-groups 
be greatly multiplied, and even though the resultant necessary 
increase in the number of respective symbols for meaning- 
groups, require that what is in form a single word, be, in its 
different meaning-presentations, recognized as two or more in¬ 
dependent linguistic entities. 
Accordingly, a recognition of the existing conjugational total 
as comprising the variant forms of several independent words— 
a recognition of so great a number of these words, that each 
one’s share of the present miscellaneous varietal whole shall 
stand for a meaning-group beyond a peradventure homoge¬ 
neric—such a recognition is backed by excellent precedent. In 
following this precedent, Grammar need not fear the charge of 
hasty innovation. Not to consider two thousand years of ab¬ 
sorption essentially without elimination—of growth without 
pruning—Grammar has stolidly retained its past unmodified 
amid the changes which in fifty years have reconstructed every 
other science, even in its foundations, down to the very foot¬ 
ings. The little concession suggested might be helpful to Gram¬ 
mar, in making language-study more endurable by rationally 
minded students, who at present, with other embarrassments— 
not to say compunctions—are bewildered by a procedure which 
defines the verb as the word which asserts, while admitting 
among its variants forms which make no assertion—a proce¬ 
dure, that is, which seems to recognize two classes of assertives, 
those which assert and those which do not. 
