108 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
To prepare the way for the perception of this new relation, 
I have argned that relation at the first expressed in “Apples 
eat themselves”—relation purely figurative—was forgotten. I 
must imagine, further, the relation which at first the preposi¬ 
tion “by” expressed, to have been forgotten also. That is, I 
think of, say, “eduntur-ab” as virtually but a single word, the 
preposition ranking merely as a supplementary element of pas¬ 
sive inflection, which has still maintained its isolation. In 
other words while “edunt” names, as the relation caused by 
eating, that of eater to food, I am thinking of “eduntur-ab” as 
naming a reverse relation—that of food to eater. 
This conception of the passive meaning can be made more 
tangible in English, though unfortunately figurative self-in¬ 
fliction is too unfamiliar in our language, to be utilized in il¬ 
lustration. Accordingly I look for aid to the regularly fac¬ 
torized “are eaten by,” but write it as a single word in the re¬ 
modeled illustration: “My apples areeatenby the boys.” 
As quasi precedent for such an innovation, I observe that he 
who stigmatizes “to repeatedly examine” as a “split infinitive” 
may well enough regard “are (often) eaten (after dark) by” as 
the analogously doubly split reverse of “eat,” and recognize in 
the unjoined “are eaten by” a unit quite as genuine as the 
equally unjoined “to examine.” That so indeed it has been 
recognized by many, is suggested by their marked analogous 
unwillingness to break the contiguity of verb and preposition. 
To illustrate, the prescribed “The brute by whom I was in¬ 
sulted” is with much persistency displaced by “The brute whom 
I was insulted by”—which after all is not by half so bad as 
German juggling with the separable preposition. Indeed that 
little but unruly member of the body sentential quite ignores 
the effort to control it, as is doubly noticeable in “The man 
(whom) she can’t appear on the street without being spoken 
to by” and trebly in “The stick that I was struck at with by 
a tramp.” 
Hor is it prepositions only, that in such a case are lawless. 
Almost one might say that with the passive “all things are possi¬ 
ble.” If in “He was given-a-cane-to” and the even more absurd 
