On English Preterites and Geiiitives. 247 get rid of the gout, by reasoning. On the contrary when it has once fast hold, like the old man on Sinbad'^s neck, the more you argue with it, the faster it sticks : and the only thing to be done is to let it have its own way, unless perchance one can have recourse to Sinbad's stratagem of making it drunk. Else Wallises remark that his itself is only the geni- tive of he^ proves that this fancied derivation is in the literal sense of the word preposterous ; so preposterous indeed, that one wonders it should ever have found favour with anybody, unless it had been with that recent Historian of the Bible, whoj to explain why the Almighty employed six days in the work of creation, when he might have effected it by a word, suggests with becoming humility, as a possible motive, that God designed to " establish the sanctity of the sabbath as well by example as precept, and to place it upon a footing more secure than by any other means it could have acquired.**' Moreover if there be any value in an argumentum ah homine^ the disciples of Home Tooke might be convinced that, as their master says nothing on this point, nothing can possibly be made of it in support of his favorite hypothesis, that all words and all ideas are a kind of zoophytes, which have no means of growth except by adhering to each other, and which you may cut into as many pieces as you like without doing them any material mischief. Nor am I acquainted with any writer of late years, who, either practically or theoretically, has held that his is a component part of our genitive : and Mr Crombie in his sensible and useful work on the Etymo- logy and Syntax of the English language, though he might, and perhaps ought, to have exprest himself more decidedly, shews that our present genitive has come down to us without any interruption from our Saxon ancestors. So that if man'^s be man his^ hominis must also be homin his^ and av^po^ must be av^p his. For in the present state of that science, which might appropriately be termed Comparative Etymology, it is impossible to doubt that the es of the genitive in the Saxon and other Teutonic dialects is identical with the is of the Latin, and with the 09 of the Greek genitives. It is found too, as oriental scholars tell us, in Sanscrit. To bring for- ward our his therefore, for the sake of solving a pheno- menon which runs over half the world, would be about as
