110 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
and with great advantage. In doing so its case-sign needed not 
to have been in former times a word complete, as was the nomi¬ 
native “s;” its meaning needed not to have been “always very 
inactive.” Enough that with the active voice, when both a first 
term and a last term are exhibited, the accusative was plainly 
felt to indicate what “suffers” or endures or is affected (or 
effected) by the action. The one that suffers is presumably 
“inactive in the action momentarily considered”-—-certainly is 
the actee. The accusative, in naming the actee, exactly matched 
the nominative in the latter’s second stage of evolution into 
namer of the actor. 
But while the nominative case advanced to an almost exclu¬ 
sive indication of the starting point in thought—that is, the 
first term—the accusative apparently made no advance. What 
indeed it named was plainly in the active voice not only 
the actee, but also quite as plainly the last term. But, so 
far as I have learned, the latter naming was not recognized. 
While accordingly the nominative had become the sign of a par¬ 
ticular thought-membership (i. e. as first term), the accusative 
remained the sign of a particular action-implication (i. e. as 
actee, or that which suffers)—one of those anomalies which 
language offers in bewildering abundance—one which might 
have been avoided, had linguistic evolution carried (1) the ac¬ 
cusative a little further or (2) the nominative not so far. Thus 
(2) if with the active voice the nominative had developed only 
to the point of standing for the actor—the accusative however 
having come to stand for the actee—the passive voice would 
rationally have exhibited its subject (the actee) in the accusa¬ 
tive,* and put the “agent” (actor) in the nominative—-with, of 
course, no preposition. 
Or (1) if in association with the active voice the accusative 
had, like the nominative, taken one more step and reached 
the point of indicating only last-term membership of thought, 
the passive might have rationally duplicated the procedure of 
* This, indeed, unless my information be at fault, has really been 
the practice of one language, demonstrating that “there are” in 
speech as well as other acts “more ways than one to skin a cat.” 
