100 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts , and Letters. 
But I have defrauded you of details. To indemnify you, I 
extend my statement, adding “in the back.” 
This however brings me to a halt. Brown couldn’t bite him¬ 
self in the back. Besides, it isn’t fair to you—and doesn’t 
satisfy my love of telling all I know—to leave the snake out 
of my story. 
Accordingly, beside the actually quite inert and purely hon¬ 
orary actor Brown, I put the really active snake, the bona fide, 
genuine actor. To the latter I assign the imaginary (figura¬ 
tive) role of coadjutor or, if you so like it better, subject in¬ 
direct, for which no doubt a sentence adequately fitted out 
may find a place as easily as for an object indirect (see p. 19- 
20), or any of the many effluents or influents or affluents or 
confluents which action, thought of as a complex stream, may 
call upon the sentence to express. 
This coadjutor (means or instrument) I might naturally 
join with the figurative actor Brown, as if the latter and the 
snake on equal terms cooperated to effect the biting. For 
“Brown with” (the snake) is almost, if not quite, synonymous 
with “Brown and” as is strongly hinted by the popular “Brown 
is good friends with me,” in which an “is,” unduly (?) in¬ 
fluenced by “Brown,” and order (thus far unreformed) are all 
perhaps that hinder this interpretation: “Brown with me— 
i. e. we two—are good friends.” 
In my liguistic thinking I prefer however to associate the 
reptile with the action , using for this purpose “with” as syno¬ 
nym for “by,” and meaning “through the agency of.”* Accord¬ 
ingly the sentence due to no invention of my own, but to a 
genius whose linguistic bow I cannot bend, “He bit himself 
in the back with (or by) a snake”—a sentence which, as well 
as the also far from original “He kicked himself on the head 
with a horse,” will bear comparison, though far less ostenta¬ 
tious, with “durch jemand in Erfahrung (zu) bringen,” which 
to me means little more than “be informed” (by some one). 
* That, in my association of the snake (the agent) with the biting 
rather than with Brown, at least I am not guilty of a mental in¬ 
novation, is apparent in the light afforded by for instance “Itur ab 
omnibus” in which only with the action (going) can the agent be 
associated. 
