SOURCES AND USE OF THE VOCABULARY. 27 
In the third person we find a wholesale sacrifice of gender, him is 
man, woman, and zt. In these citations I find but a single instance of 
she, none at all in my own knowledge of the jargon; and as this 
single instance is supplied by Miss Grimshaw we may disbelieve, but 
we must show our manners and yield politely place aux dames. 
In Beach-la-mar these pronouns lack pronominal vigor. They 
may stand alone, but in general they are found leaning for support 
upon the universal noun fellow. Fellow is man or woman. Our 
pronouns when they pass to island keeping seem too weak to be erect 
and need the prop. The same word sustains the numerals. In this 
usage we get a glimpse of the reason. The numeral is too abstract 
in itself; it needs a differentiating device to show that it is used in a 
concrete sense. Where fasi means ‘‘one’’ it is necessary to employ 
to‘atast when one man is counted. If this be the ignorance of the 
savage we are not much better; our drovers reckon cattle as so many 
head, our soldiers compute arms as so many stand. Therefore it 
behooves us when we scan the entries under fellow in this vocabulary 
to burnish our own pots before we remark upon the blackness of 
cannibal kettles. 
It will prove scarcely worth while to formulate the rules of the 
grammar of this speech. They will best be acquired from study of the 
examples presented in the vocabulary and in the Edensermon. Each 
word stands fixed, a unit of speech; it rises serene above the shifts 
of paradigms; case and number, mood and tense and voice leave it 
high and dry. Inthe adjective comparison is unknown; the islanders 
do not know how to think comparatively—at least they lack the 
form of words by which comparison may be indicated; ‘‘this big, 
that small’’ is the nearest they can come to the expression of the idea 
that one thing is greater than another. Because of this absence of 
comparative thought I incline to regard the frequent more betier as 
comparative only in the estimation of the white men; to the islander 
it must come only as an emphasis upon positive statement. 
In the verb we encounter a form-phase which may suggest inflec- 
tion. This is the final syllable which in our authorities appears as 
’'m, um or em, or even by a species of grammatical scrupulosity as 
him. I can not seein any case here presented, or in my wider famil- 
larity with the speech, any reason to regard this as in any sort a 
personal pronoun in the position of the former of a double object. 
In general there is the objection that the speech is yet far below such 
a nicety of grammar; in particular opposition we find the termina- 
tion applied to attributives with verbal powers in cases where the 
object can be reached only by the bridge of an interjected along. 
Euphony is equally out of question as an explanation. There is not 
the slightest suggestion of euphony in the jargon at large. Further- 
more (and this is of great importance as bearing on such a suggestion 
