BY WILLIAM CHAUNCEY FOWLER, LL.D.,

LATE PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC IN AMHERST COLLEGE.

NEW YORK:

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS

PEARL STREET, FRANKLIN SQUARE

1881.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight

hundred and fifty-five, by

HARPER & BROTHERS,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.

ADDITIONAL PREFACE.

THE additional helps recently furnished to this work seem to demand an additional preface explanatory of their value and use.

I. Two indexes have been annexed to it, the one of words, and the other of subjects. The first comprises a list of nearly 9000 words found in the body of the work, and thus often serves the purpose of a dictionary, but with more fullness of philological information. For while a dictionary furnishes information concerning the individual word under consideration, the grammar shows its connection with a group of words with which it is classed, and in its relation to some general fact or principle. Thus, in the dictionary, the word Algebra stands isolated from kindred words; in the grammar it stands in a class of words resembling one another in form and feature, so that in obtaining a knowledge of the word from the grammar, you at the same time obtain a knowledge of the group or class.

Dictionaries, even the large ones of Webster and Worcester, are very deficient in grammatical etymology. Thus, if a student seeks to know whether the word cannon has the same form in the singular and in the plural, he will look into those dictionaries in vain; but the index of words in this grammar refers him to the text, which informs him that the word is used in the same form in both numbers. So important did Dr. Johnson and Dr. Webster consider a grammar as a

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