VOLUME XII SLICE III Gordon, Lord George to Grasses (continued 7)

GRAHAM, SIR JAMES ROBERT GEORGE, Bart. (1792-1861), British statesman, son of a baronet, was born at Naworth, Cumberland, on the 1st of June 1792, and was educated at Westminster and Oxford. Shortly after quitting the university, while making the “grand tour” abroad, he became private secretary to the British minister in Sicily. Returning to England in 1818 he was elected to parliament as member for Hull in the Whig interest; but he was unseated at the election of 1820. In 1824 he succeeded to the baronetcy; and in 1826 he re-entered parliament as representative for Carlisle, a seat which he soon exchanged for the county of Cumberland. In the same year he published a pamphlet entitled “Corn and Currency,” which brought him into prominence as a man of advanced Liberal opinions; and he became one of the most energetic advocates in parliament of the Reform Bill. On the formation of Earl Grey’s administration he received the post of first lord of the admiralty, with a seat in the cabinet. From 1832 to 1837 he sat for the eastern division of the county of Cumberland. Dissensions on the Irish Church question led to his withdrawal from the ministry in 1834, and ultimately to his joining the Conservative party. Rejected by his former constituents in 1837, he was in 1838 elected for Pembroke, and in 1841 for Dorchester. In the latter year he took office under Sir Robert Peel as secretary of state for the home department, a post he retained until 1846. As home secretary he incurred considerable odium in Scotland, by his unconciliating policy on the church question prior to the “disruption” of 1843; and in 1844 the detention and opening of letters at the post-office by his warrant raised a storm of public indignation, which was hardly allayed by the favourable report of a parliamentary committee of investigation. From 1846 to 1852 he was out of office; but in the latter year he joined Lord Aberdeen’s cabinet as first lord of the admiralty, in which capacity he acted also for a short time in the Palmerston ministry of 1855. The appointment of a select committee of inquiry into the conduct of the Russian war ultimately led to his withdrawal from official life. He continued as a private member to exercise a considerable influence on parliamentary opinion. He died at Netherby, Cumberland, on the 25th of October 1861.

His Life, by C. S. Parker, was published in 1907.

GRAHAM, SYLVESTER (1794-1851), American dietarian, was born in Suffield, Connecticut, in 1794. He studied at Amherst College, and was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1826, but he seems to have preached but little. He became an ardent advocate of temperance reform and of vegetarianism, having persuaded himself that a flesh diet was the cause of abnormal cravings. His last years were spent in retirement and he died at Northampton, Massachusetts, on the 11th of September 1851. His name is now remembered because of his advocacy of unbolted (Graham) flour, and as the originator of “Graham bread.” But his reform was much broader than this. He urged, primarily, physiological education, and in his Science of Human Life (1836; republished, with biographical memoir, 1858) furnished an exhaustive text-book on the subject. He had carefully planned a complete regimen including many details besides a strict diet. A Temperance (or Graham) Boarding House was opened in New York City about 1832 by Mrs Asenath Nicholson, who published Nature’s Own Book (2nd ed., 1835) giving Graham’s rules for boarders; and in Boston a Graham House was opened in 1837 at 23 Brattle Street.

There were many Grahamites at Brook Farm, and the American Physiological Society published in Boston in 1837 and 1838 a weekly called The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, designed to illustrate by facts and sustain by reason and principles the science of human life as taught by Sylvester Graham, edited by David Campbell. Graham wrote Essay on Cholera (1832); The Esculapian Tablets of the Nineteenth Century (1834); Lectures to Young Men on Chastity (2nd ed., 1837); and Bread and Bread Making; and projected a work designed to show that his system was not counter to the Holy Scriptures.

GRAHAM, THOMAS (1805-1869), British chemist, born at Glasgow on the 20th of December 1805, was the son of a merchant of that city. In 1819 he entered the university of Glasgow with the intention of becoming a minister of the Established Church. But under the influence of Thomas Thomson (1773-1852), the professor of chemistry, he developed a taste for experimental science and especially for molecular physics, a subject which formed his main preoccupation throughout his life. After graduating in 1824, he spent two years in the laboratory of Professor T. C. Hope at Edinburgh, and on returning to Glasgow gave lessons in mathematics, and subsequently chemistry, until the year 1829, when he was appointed lecturer in the Mechanics’ Institute. In 1830 he succeeded Dr Andrew Ure (1778-1857) as professor of chemistry in the Andersonian Institution, and in 1837, on the death of Dr Edward Turner, he was transferred to the chair of chemistry in University College, London. There he remained till 1855, when he succeeded Sir John Herschel as Master of the Mint, a post he held until his death on the 16th of September 1869. The onerous duties his work at the Mint entailed severely tried his energies, and in quitting a purely scientific career he was subjected to the cares of official life, for which he was not fitted by temperament. The researches, however, which he conducted between 1861 and 1869 were as brilliant as any of those in which he engaged. Graham was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1836, and a corresponding member of the Institute of France in 1847, while Oxford made him a D. C. L. in 1855. He took a leading part in the foundation of the London Chemical and the Cavendish societies, and served as first president of both, in 1841 and 1846. Towards the close of his life the presidency of the Royal Society was offered him, but his failing health caused him to decline the honour.

Graham’s work is remarkable at once for its originality and for the simplicity of the methods employed obtaining most important results. He communicated papers to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow before the work of that society was recorded in Transactions, but his first published paper, “On the Absorption of Gases by Liquids,” appeared in the Annals of Philosophy for 1826. The subject with which his name is most prominently associated is the diffusion of gases. In his first paper on this subject (1829) he thus summarizes the knowledge experiment had afforded as to the laws which regulate the movement of gases. “Fruitful as the miscibility of gases has been in interesting speculations, the experimental information we possess on the subject amounts to little more than the well-established fact that gases of a different nature when brought into contact do not arrange themselves according to their density, but they spontaneously diffuse through each other so as to remain in an intimate state of mixture for any length of time.” For the fissured jar of J. W. Döbereiner he substituted a glass tube closed by a plug of plaster of Paris, and with this simple appliance he developed the law now known by his name “that the diffusion rate of gases is inversely as the square root of their density.” (See Diffusion.) He further studied the passage of gases by transpiration through fine tubes, and by effusion through a minute hole in a platinum disk, and was enabled to show that gas may enter a vacuum in three different ways: (1) by the molecular movement of diffusion, in virtue of which a gas penetrates through the pores of a disk of compressed graphite; (2) by effusion through an orifice of sensible dimensions in a platinum disk the relative times of the effusion of gases in mass being similar to those of the molecular diffusion, although a gas is usually carried by the former kind of impulse with a velocity many thousand times as great as is demonstrable by the latter; and (3) by the peculiar rate of passage due to transpiration through fine tubes, in which the ratios appear to be in direct relation with no other known property of the same gases—thus hydrogen has exactly double the transpiration rate of nitrogen, the relation of those gases as to density being as 1 : 14. He subsequently examined the passage of gases through septa or partitions of india-rubber, unglazed earthenware and plates of metals such as palladium, and proved that gases pass through these septa neither by diffusion nor effusion nor by transpiration, but in virtue of a selective absorption which the septa appear to exert on the gases in contact with them. By this means (“atmolysis”) he was enabled partially to separate oxygen from air.

His early work on the movements of gases led him to examine the spontaneous movements of liquids, and as a result of the experiments he divided bodies into two classes—crystalloids, such as common salt, and colloids, of which gum-arabic is a type—the former having high and the latter low diffusibility. He also proved that the process of liquid diffusion causes partial decomposition of certain chemical compounds, the potassium sulphate, for instance, being separated from the aluminium sulphate in alum by the higher diffusibility of the former salt. He also extended his work on the transpiration of gases to liquids, adopting the method of manipulation devised by J. L. M. Poiseuille. He found that dilution with water does not effect proportionate alteration in the transpiration velocities of different liquids, and a certain determinable degree of dilution retards the transpiration velocity.

With regard to Graham’s more purely chemical work, in 1833 he showed that phosphoric anhydride and water form three distinct acids, and he thus established the existence of polybasic acids, in each of which one or more equivalents of hydrogen are replaceable by certain metals (see Acid). In 1835 he published the results of an examination of the properties of water of crystallization as a constituent of salts. Not the least interesting part of this inquiry was the discovery of certain definite salts with alcohol analogous to hydrates, to which the name of alcoholates was given. A brief paper entitled “Speculative Ideas on the Constitution of Matter” (1863) possesses special interest in connexion with work done since his death, because in it he expressed the view that the various kinds of matter now recognized as different elementary substances may possess one and the same ultimate or atomic molecule in different conditions of movement.

Graham’s Elements of Chemistry, first published in 1833, went through several editions, and appeared also in German, remodelled under J. Otto’s direction. His Chemical and Physical Researches were collected by Dr James Young and Dr Angus Smith, and printed “for presentation only” at Edinburgh in 1876, Dr Smith contributing to the volume a valuable preface and analysis of its contents. See also T. E. Thorpe, Essays in Historical Chemistry (1902).

GRAHAME, JAMES (1765-1811), Scottish poet, was born in Glasgow on the 22nd of April 1765, the son of a successful lawyer. After completing his literary course at Glasgow university, Grahame went in 1784 to Edinburgh, where he qualified as writer to the signet, and subsequently for the Scottish bar, of which he was elected a member in 1795. But his preferences had always been for the Church, and when he was forty-four he took Anglican orders, and became a curate first at Shipton, Gloucestershire, and then at Sedgefield, Durham. His works include a dramatic poem, Mary Queen of Scots (1801), The Sabbath (1804), British Georgics (1804), The Birds of Scotland (1806), and Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1810). His principal work, The Sabbath, a sacred and descriptive poem in blank verse, is characterized by devotional feeling and by happy delineation of Scottish scenery. In the notes to his poems he expresses enlightened views on popular education, the criminal law and other public questions. He was emphatically a friend of humanity—a philanthropist as well as a poet. He died in Glasgow on the 14th of September 1811.

GRAHAM’S DYKE (or Sheugh = trench), a local name for the Roman fortified frontier, consisting of rampart, forts and road, which ran across the narrow isthmus of Scotland from the Forth to the Clyde (about 36 m.), and formed from A.D. 140 till about 185 the northern frontier of Roman Britain. The name is locally explained as recording a victorious assault on the defences by one Robert Graham and his men; it has also been connected with the Grampian Hills and the Latin surveying term groma. But, as is shown by its earliest recorded spelling, Grymisdyke (Fordun, A.D. 1385), it is the same as the term Grim’s Ditch which occurs several times in England in connexion with early ramparts—for example, near Wallingford in south Oxfordshire or between Berkhampstead (Herts) and Bradenham (Bucks). Grim seems to be a Teutonic god or devil, who might be credited with the wish to build earthworks in unreasonably short periods of time. By antiquaries the Graham’s Dyke is usually styled the Wall of Pius or the Antonine Vallum, after the emperor Antoninus Pius, in whose reign it was constructed. See further Britain: Roman.

(F. J. H.)

GRAHAM’S TOWN, a city of South Africa, the administrative centre for the eastern part of the Cape province, 106 m. by rail N.E. of Port Elizabeth and 43 m. by rail N.N.W. of Port Alfred. Pop. (1904) 13,887, of whom 7283 were whites and 1837 were electors. The town is built in a basin of the grassy hills forming the spurs of the Zuurberg, 1760 ft. above sea-level. It is a pleasant place of residence, has a remarkably healthy climate, and is regarded as the most English-like town in the Cape. The streets are broad, and most of them lined with trees. In the High Street are the law courts, the Anglican cathedral of St George, built from designs by Sir Gilbert Scott, and Commemoration Chapel, the chief place of worship of the Wesleyans, erected by the British emigrants of 1820. The Roman Catholic cathedral of St Patrick, a Gothic building, is to the left of the High Street. The town hall, also in the Gothic style, has a square clock tower built on arches over the pavement. Graham’s Town is one of the chief educational centres in the Cape province. Besides the public schools and the Rhodes University College (which in 1904 took over part of the work carried on since 1855 by St Andrew’s College), scholastic institutions are maintained by religious bodies. The town possesses two large hospitals, which receive patients from all parts of South Africa, and the government bacteriological institute. It is the centre of trade for an extensive pastoral and agricultural district. Owing to the sour quality of the herbage in the surrounding zuurveld, stock-breeding and wool-growing have been, however, to some extent replaced by ostrich-farming, for which industry Graham’s Town is the most important entrepôt. Dairy farming is much practised in the neighbourhood.

In 1812 the site of the town was chosen as the headquarters of the British troops engaged in protecting the frontier of Cape Colony from the inroads of the Kaffirs, and it was named after Colonel John Graham (1778-1821), then commanding the forces. (Graham had commanded the light infantry battalion at the taking of the Cape by the British in the action of the 6th of January 1806. He also took part in campaigns in Italy and Holland during the Napoleonic wars.) In 1819 an attempt was made by the Kaffirs to surprise Graham’s Town, and 10,000 men attacked it, but they were repulsed by the garrison, which numbered not more than 320 men, infantry and artillery, under Lieut.-Colonel (afterwards General Sir) Thomas Willshire. In 1822 the town was chosen as the headquarters of the 4000 British immigrants who had reached Cape Colony in 1820. It has maintained its position as the most important inland town of the eastern part of the Cape province. In 1864 the Cape parliament met in Graham’s Town, the only instance of the legislature sitting elsewhere than in Cape Town. It is governed by a municipality. The rateable value in 1906 was £891,536 and the rate levied 2½d. in the pound.

See T. Sheffield, The Story of the Settlement ... (2nd ed., Graham’s Town, 1884); C. T. Campbell, British South Africa ... with notices of some of the British Settlers of 1820 (London, 1897).

GRAIL, THE HOLY, the famous talisman of Arthurian romance, the object of quest on the part of the knights of the Round Table. It is mainly, if not wholly, known to English readers through the medium of Malory’s translation of the French Quête du Saint Graal, where it is the cup or chalice of the Last Supper, in which the blood which flowed from the wounds of the crucified Saviour has been miraculously preserved. Students of the original romances are aware that there is in these texts an extraordinary diversity of statement as to the nature and origin of the Grail, and that it is extremely difficult to determine the precise value of these differing versions.1 Broadly speaking the Grail romances have been divided into two main classes: (1) those dealing with the search for the Grail, the Quest, and (2) those relating to its early history. These latter appear to be dependent on the former, for whereas we may have a Quest romance without any insistence on the previous history of the Grail, that history is never found without some allusion to the hero who is destined to bring the quest to its successful termination. The Quest versions again fall into three distinct classes, differentiated by the personality of the hero who is respectively Gawain, Perceval or Galahad. The most important and interesting group is that connected with Perceval, and he was regarded as the original Grail hero, Gawain being, as it were, his understudy. Recent discoveries, however, point to a different conclusion, and indicate that the Gawain stories represent an early tradition, and that we must seek in them rather than in the Perceval versions for indications as to the ultimate origin of the Grail.

The character of this talisman or relic varies greatly, as will be seen from the following summary.

1. Gawain, included in the continuation to Chrétien’s Perceval by Wauchier de Denain, and attributed to Bleheris the Welshman, who is probably identical with the Bledhericus of Giraldus Cambrensis, and considerably earlier than Chrétien de Troyes. Here the Grail is a food-providing, self-acting talisman, the precise nature of which is not specified; it is designated as the “rich” Grail, and serves the king and his court sans serjant et sans seneschal, the butlers providing the guests with wine. In another version, given at an earlier point of the same continuation, but apparently deriving from a later source, the Grail is borne in procession by a weeping maiden, and is called the “holy” Grail, but no details as to its history or character are given. In a third version, that of Diu Crône, a long and confused romance, the origin of which has not been determined, the Grail appears as a reliquary, in which the Host is presented to the king, who once a year partakes alike of it and of the blood which flows from the lance. Another account is given in the prose Lancelot, but here Gawain has been deposed from his post as first hero of the court, and, as is to be expected from the treatment meted out to him in this romance, the visit ends in his complete discomfiture. The Grail is here surrounded with the atmosphere of awe and reverence familiar to us through the Quête, and is regarded as the chalice of the Last Supper. These are the Gawain versions.

2. Perceval.—The most important Perceval text is the Conte del Grael, or Perceval le Galois of Chrétien de Troyes. Here the Grail is wrought of gold richly set with precious stones; it is carried in solemn procession, and the light issuing from it extinguishes that of the candles. What it is is not explained, but inasmuch as it is the vehicle in which is conveyed the Host on which the father of the Fisher king depends for nutriment, it seems not improbable that here, as in Diu Crône, it is to be understood as a reliquary. In the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the ultimate source of which is identical with that of Chrétien, on the contrary, the Grail is represented as a precious stone, brought to earth by angels, and committed to the guardianship of the Grail king and his descendants. It is guarded by a body of chosen knights, or templars, and acts alike as a life and youth preserving talisman—no man may die within eight days of beholding it, and the maiden who bears it retains perennial youth—and an oracle choosing its own servants, and indicating whom the Grail king shall wed. The sole link with the Christian tradition is the statement that its virtue is renewed every Good Friday by the agency of a dove from heaven. The discrepancy between this and the other Grail romances is most startling.

In the short prose romance known as the “Didot” Perceval we have, for the first time, the whole history of the relic logically set forth. The Perceval forms the third and concluding section of a group of short romances, the two preceding being the Joseph of Arimathea and the Merlin. In the first we have the precise history of the Grail, how it was the dish of the Last Supper, confided by our Lord to the care of Joseph, whom he miraculously visited in the prison to which he had been committed by the Jews. It was subsequently given by Joseph to his brother-in-law Brons, whose grandson Perceval is destined to be the final winner and guardian of the relic. The Merlin forms the connecting thread between this definitely ecclesiastical romance and the chivalric atmosphere of Arthur’s court; and finally, in the Perceval, the hero, son of Alain and grandson to Brons, is warned by Merlin of the quest which awaits him and which he achieves after various adventures.

In the Perlesvaus the Grail is the same, but the working out of the scheme is much more complex; a son of Joseph of Arimathea, Josephe, is introduced, and we find a spiritual knighthood similar to that used so effectively in the Parzival.

3. Galahad.—The Quête du Saint Graal, the only romance of which Galahad is the hero, is dependent on and a completion of the Lancelot development of the Arthurian cycle. Lancelot, as lover of Guinevere, could not be permitted to achieve so spiritual an emprise, yet as leading knight of Arthur’s court it was impossible to allow him to be surpassed by another. Hence the invention of Galahad, son to Lancelot by the Grail king’s daughter; predestined by his lineage to achieve the quest, foredoomed, the quest achieved, to vanish, a sacrifice to his father’s fame, which, enhanced by connexion with the Grail-winner, could not risk eclipse by his presence. Here the Grail, the chalice of the Last Supper, is at the same time, as in the Gawain stories, self-acting and food-supplying.

The last three romances unite, it will be seen, the quest and the early history. Introductory to the Galahad quest, and dealing only with the early history, is the Grand Saint Graal, a work of interminable length, based upon the Joseph of Arimathea, which has undergone numerous revisions and amplifications: its precise relation to the Lancelot, with which it has now much matter in common, is not easy to determine.

To be classed also under the head of early history are certain interpolations in the MSS. of the Perceval, where we find the Joseph tradition, but in a somewhat different form, e.g. he is said to have caused the Grail to be made for the purpose of receiving the holy blood. With this account is also connected the legend of the Volto Santo of Lucca, a crucifix said to have been carved by Nicodemus. In the conclusion to Chrétien’s poem, composed by Manessier some fifty years later, the Grail is said to have followed Joseph to Britain, how, is not explained. Another continuation by Gerbert, interpolated between those of Wauchier and Manessier, relates how the Grail was brought to Britain by Perceval’s mother in the companionship of Joseph.

It will be seen that with the exception of the Grand Saint Graal, which has now been practically converted into an introduction to the Quête, no two versions agree with each other; indeed, with the exception of the oldest Gawain-Grail visit, that due to Bleheris, they do not agree with themselves, but all show, more or less, the influence of different and discordant versions. Why should the vessel of the Last Supper, jealously guarded at Castle Corbenic, visit Arthur’s court independently? Why does a sacred relic provide purely material food? What connexion can there be between a precious stone, a baetylus, as Dr Hagen has convincingly shown, and Good Friday? These, and such questions as these, suggest themselves at every turn.

Numerous attempts have been made to solve these problems, and to construct a theory of the origin of the Grail story, but so far the difficulty has been to find an hypothesis which would admit of the practically simultaneous existence of apparently contradictory features. At one time considered as an introduction from the East, the theory of the Grail as an Oriental talisman has now been discarded, and the expert opinion of the day may be said to fall into two groups: (1) those who hold the Grail to have been from the first a purely Christian vessel which has accidentally, and in a manner never clearly explained, acquired certain folk-lore characteristics; and (2) those who hold, on the contrary, that the Grail is aborigine folk-lore and Celtic, and that the Christian development is a later and accidental rather than an essential feature of the story. The first view is set forth in the work of Professor Birch-Hirschfeld, the second in that of Mr Alfred Nutt, the two constituting the only travaux d’ensemble which have yet appeared on the subject. It now seems probable that both are in a measure correct, and that the ultimate solution will be recognized to lie in a blending of two originally independent streams of tradition. The researches of Professor Mannhardt in Germany and of J. G. Frazer in England have amply demonstrated the enduring influence exercised on popular thought and custom by certain primitive forms of vegetation worship, of which the most noteworthy example is the so-called mysteries of Adonis. Here the ordinary processes of nature and progression of the seasons were symbolized under the figure of the death and resuscitation of the god. These rites are found all over the world, and in his monumental work, The Golden Bough, Dr Frazer has traced a host of extant beliefs and practices to this source. The earliest form of the Grail story, the Gawain-Bleheris version, exhibits a marked affinity with the characteristic features of the Adonis or Tammuz worship; we have a castle on the sea-shore, a dead body on a bier, the identity of which is never revealed, mourned over with solemn rites; a wasted country, whose desolation is mysteriously connected with the dead man, and which is restored to fruitfulness when the quester asks the meaning of the marvels he beholds (the two features of the weeping women and the wasted land being retained in versions where they have no significance); finally the mysterious food-providing, self-acting talisman of a common feast—one and all of these features may be explained as survivals of the Adonis ritual. Professor Martin long since suggested that a key to the problems of the Arthurian cycle was to be found in a nature myth: Professor Rhys regards Arthur as an agricultural hero; Dr Lewis Mott has pointed out the correspondence between the so-called Round Table sites and the ritual of nature worship; but it is only with the discovery of the existence of Bleheris as reputed authority for Arthurian tradition, and the consequent recognition that the Grail story connected with his name is the earliest form of the legend, that we have secured a solid basis for such theories.

With regard to the religious form of the story, recent research has again aided us—we know now that a legend similar in all respects to the Joseph of Arimathea Grail story was widely current at least a century before our earliest Grail texts. The story with Nicodemus as protagonist is told of the Saint-Sang relic at Fécamp; and, as stated already, a similar origin is ascribed to the Volto Santo at Lucca. In this latter case the legend professes to date from the 8th century, and scholars who have examined the texts in their present form consider that there may be solid ground for this attribution. It is thus demonstrable that the material for our Grail legend, in its present form, existed long anterior to any extant text, and there is no improbability in holding that a confused tradition of pagan mysteries which had assumed the form of a popular folk-tale, became finally Christianized by combination with an equally popular ecclesiastical legend, the point of contact being the vessel of the common ritual feast. Nor can there be much doubt that in this process of combination the Fécamp legend played an important rôle. The best and fullest of the Perceval MSS. refer to a book written at Fécamp as source for certain Perceval adventures. What this book was we do not know, but in face of the fact that certain special Fécamp relics, silver knives, appear in the Grail procession of the Parzival, it seems most probable that it was a Perceval-Grail story. The relations between the famous Benedictine abbey and the English court both before and after the Conquest were of an intimate character. Legends of the part played by Joseph of Arimathea in the conversion of Britain are closely connected with Glastonbury, the monks of which foundation showed, in the 12th century, considerable literary activity, and it seems a by no means improbable hypothesis that the present form of the Grail legend may be due to a monk of Glastonbury elaborating ideas borrowed from Fécamp. This much is certain, that between the Saint-Sang of Fécamp, the Volto Santo of Lucca, and the Grail tradition, there exists a connecting link, the precise nature of which has yet to be determined. The two former were popular objects of pilgrimage; was the third originally intended to serve the same purpose by attracting attention to the reputed burial-place of the apostle of the Grail, Joseph of Arimathea?

Bibliography.—For the Gawain Grail visits see the Potvin edition of the Perceval, which, however, only gives the Bleheris version; the second visit is found in the best and most complete MSS., such as 12,576 and 12,577 (Fonds français) of the Paris library. Diu Crône, edited by Scholl (Stuttgart, 1852). vol. vi. of Arthurian Romances (Nutt), gives a translation of the Bleheris, Diu Crône and Prose Lancelot visits.

The Conte del Graal, or Perceval, is only accessible in the edition of M. Potvin (6 vols., 1866-1871). The Mons MS., from which this has been printed, has proved to be an exceedingly poor and untrustworthy text. Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, has been frequently and well edited; the edition by Bartsch (1875-1877), in Deutsche Classiker des Mittelalters, contains full notes and a glossary. Suitable for the more advanced student are those by K. Lachmann (1891), Leitzmann (1902-1903) and E. Martin (1903). There are modern German translations by Simrock (very close to the original) and Hertz (excellent notes). English translation with notes and appendices by J. L. Weston. “Didot” Perceval, ed. Hucher, Le Saint Graal (1875-1878), vol. i. Perlesvaus was printed by Potvin, under the title of Perceval le Gallois, in vol. i. of the edition above referred to; a Welsh version from the Hengwert MS. was published with translation by Canon R. Williams (2 vols., 1876-1892). Under the title of The High History of the Holy Grail a fine version was published by Dr Sebastian Evans in the Temple Classics (2 vols., 1898). The Grand Saint Graal was published by Hucher as given above; this edition includes the Joseph of Arimathea. A 15th century metrical English adaptation by one Henry Lovelich, was printed by Dr Furnivall for the Roxburghe Club 1861-1863; a new edition was undertaken for the Early English Text Society. Quête du Saint Graal can best be studied in Malory’s somewhat abridged translation, books xiii.-xviii. of the Morte Arthur. It has also been printed by Dr Furnivall for the Roxburghe Club, from a MS. in the British Museum. Neither of these texts is, however, very good, and the student who can decipher old Dutch would do well to read it in the metrical translation published by Joenckbloet, Roman van Lanceloet, as the original here was considerably fuller.

For general treatment of the subject see Legend of Sir Perceval, by J. L. Weston, Grimm Library, vol. xvii. (1906); Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail, by A. Nutt (1888), and a more concise treatment of the subject by the same writer in No. 14 of Popular Studies (1902); Professor Birch-Hirschfeld’s Die Sage vom Gral (1877). The late Professor Heinzel’s Die alt-französischen Gral-Romane contains a mass of valuable matter, but is very confused and ill-arranged. For the Fécamp legend see Leroux de Lincey’s Essai sur l’abbaye de Fescamp (1840); for the Volto Santo and kindred legends, Ernest von Dobschütz, Christus-Bilder (Leipzig, 1899).

(J. L. W.)

1 The etymology of the O. Fr. graal or greal, of which “grail” is an adaptation, has been much discussed. The Low Lat. original, gradale or grasale, a flat dish or platter, has generally been taken to represent a diminutive cratella of crater, bowl, or a lost cratale, formed from the same word (see W. W. Skeat, Preface to Joseph of Arimathie, Early Eng. Text Soc).—Ed.

GRAIN (derived through the French from Lat. granum, seed, from an Aryan root meaning “to wear down,” which also appears in the common Teutonic word “corn”), a word particularly applied to the seed, in botanical language the “fruit,” of cereals, and hence applied, as a collective term to cereal plants generally, to which, in English, the term “corn” is also applied (see Grain Trade). Apart from this, the chief meaning, the word is used of the malt refuse of brewing and distilling, and of many hard rounded small particles, resembling the seeds of plants, such as “grains” of sand, salt, gold, gunpowder, &c. “Grain” is also the name of the smallest unit of weight, both in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Its origin is supposed to be the weight of a grain of wheat, dried and gathered from the middle of the ear. The troy grain = 1/5760 of a ℔, the avoirdupois grain = 1/7000 of a ℔. In diamond weighing the grain = ¼ of the carat, = .7925 of the troy grain. The word “grains” was early used, as also in French, of the small seed-like insects supposed formerly to be the berries of trees, from which a scarlet dye was extracted (see Cochineal and Kermes). From the Fr. en graine, literally in dye, comes the French verb engrainer, Eng. “engrain” or “ingrain,” meaning to dye in any fast colour. From the further use of “grain” for the texture of substances, such as wood, meat, &c., “engrained” or “ingrained” means ineradicable, impregnated, dyed through and through. The “grain” of leather is the side of a skin showing the fibre after the hair has been removed. The imitating in paint of the grain of different kinds of woods is known as “graining” (see Painter-Work). “Grain,” or more commonly in the plural “grains,” construed as a singular, is the name of an instrument with two or more barbed prongs, used for spearing fish. This word is Scandinavian in origin, and is connected with Dan. green, Swed. gren, branch, and means the fork of a tree, of the body, or the prongs of a fork, &c. It is not connected with “groin,” the inguinal parts of the body, which in its earliest forms appears as grynde.

GRAINS OF PARADISE, Guinea Grains, or Melegueta Pepper (Ger. Paradieskörner, Fr. graines de Paradis, maniguette), the seeds of Amomum Melegueta, a reed-like plant of the natural order Zingiberaceae. It is a native of tropical western Africa, and of Prince’s and St Thomas’s islands in the Gulf of Guinea, is cultivated in other tropical countries, and may with ease be grown in hothouses in temperate climates. The plant has a branched horizontal rhizome; smooth, nearly sessile, narrowly lanceolate-oblong alternate leaves; large, white, pale pink or purplish flowers; and an ovate-oblong fruit, ensheathed in bracts, which is of a scarlet colour when fresh, and reaches under cultivation a length of 5 in. The seeds are contained in the acid pulp of the fruit, are commonly wedge-shaped and bluntly angular, are about 1¼ lines in diameter and have a glossy dark-brown husk, with a conical light-coloured membranous caruncle at the base and a white kernel. They contain, according to Flückiger and Hanbury, 0.3% of a faintly yellowish neutral essential oil, having an aromatic, not acrid taste, and a specific gravity at 15.5° C of 0.825, and giving on analysis the formula C20H32O, or C10H16 + C10H16O; also 5.83% of an intensely pungent, viscid, brown resin.

Grains of paradise were formerly officinal in British pharmacopoeias, and in the 13th and succeeding centuries were used as a drug and a spice, the wine known as hippocras being flavoured with them and with ginger and cinnamon. In 1629 they were employed among the ingredients of the twenty-four herring pies which were the ancient fee-favour of the city of Norwich, ordained to be carried to court by the lord of the manor of Carleton (Johnston and Church, Chem. of Common Life, p. 355, 1879). Grains of paradise were anciently brought overland from West Africa to the Mediterranean ports of the Barbary states, to be shipped for Italy. They are now exported almost exclusively from the Gold Coast. Grains of paradise are to some extent used illegally to give a fictitious strength to malt liquors, gin and cordials. By 56 Geo. III. c. 58, no brewer or dealer in beer shall have in his possession or use grains of paradise, under a penalty of £200 for each offence; and no druggist shall sell the same to a brewer under a penalty of £500. They are, however, devoid of any injurious physiological action, and are much esteemed as a spice by the natives of Guinea.

See Bentley and Trimen, Medicinal Plants, tab. 268; Lanessan, Hist. des Drogues, pp. 456-460 (1878).

GRAIN TRADE. The complexity of the conditions of life in the 20th century may be well illustrated from the grain trade of the world. The ordinary bread sold in Great Britain represents, for example, produce of nearly every country in the world outside the tropics.

Wheat has been cultivated from remote antiquity. In a wild state it is practically unknown. It is alleged to have been found growing wild between the Euphrates and the Tigris; but the discovery has never been authenticated, General considerations. and, unless the plant be sedulously cared for, the species dies out in a surprisingly short space of time. Modern experiments in cross-fertilization in Lancashire by the Garton Brothers have evolved the most extraordinary “sports,” showing, it is claimed, that the plant has probably passed through stages of which until the present day there had been no conception. The tales that grains of wheat found in the cerements of Egyptian mummies have been planted and come to maturity are no longer credited, for the vital principle in the wheat berry is extremely evanescent; indeed, it is doubtful whether wheat twenty years old is capable of reproduction. The Garton artificial fertilization experiments have shown endless deviations from the ordinary type, ranging from minute seeds with a closely adhering husk to big berries almost as large as sloes and about as worthless. It is conjectured that the wheat plant, as now known, is a degenerate form of something much finer which flourished thousands of years ago, and that possibly it may be restored to its pristine excellence, yielding an increase twice or thrice as large as it now does, thus postponing to a distant period the famine doom prophesied by Sir W. Crookes in his presidential address to the British Association in 1898. Wheat well repays careful attention; contrast the produce of a carelessly tilled Russian or Indian field and the bountiful yield on a good Lincolnshire farm, the former with its average yield of 8 bushels, the latter with its 50 bushels per acre; or compare the quality, as regards the quantity and flavour of the flour from a fine sample of British wheat, such as is on sale at almost every agricultural show in Great Britain, with the produce of an Egyptian or Syrian field; the difference is so great as to cause one to doubt whether the berries are of the same species.

It may be stated roundly that an average quartern loaf in Great Britain is made from wheat grown in the following countries in the proportions named:—

U.S.A. U.K. Russia. Argentina. British India. Canada. Rumania- Bulgaria. Australia. Other Countries.

Oz. Oz. Oz. Oz. Oz. Oz. Oz. Oz. Oz.

26 13 9 5 4 3 2 1 1

Or expressed in percentages as follows:—

40 20 14 8 6 5 3 2 2

For details connected with grain and its handling see Agriculture, Corn Laws, Granaries, Flour, Baking, Wheat, &c.

Wheat occupies of all cereals the widest region of any food-stuff. Rice, which shares with millet the distinction of being the principal food-stuff of the greatest number of human beings, is not grown nearly as widely as is wheat, the staple food of the white races. Wheat grows as far south as Patagonia, and as far north as the edge of the Arctic Circle; it flourishes throughout Europe, and across the whole of northern Asia and in Japan; it is cultivated in Persia, and raised largely in India, as far south as the Nizam’s dominions. It is grown over nearly the whole of North America. In Canada a very fine wheat crop was raised in the autumn of 1898 as far north as the mission at Fort Providence, on the Mackenzie river, in a latitude above 62°—or less than 200 m. south of the latitude of Dawson City—the period between seed-time and harvest having been ninety-one days. In Africa it was an article of commerce in the days of Jacob, whose son Joseph may be said to have run the first and only successful “corner” in wheat. For many centuries Egypt was famous as a wheat raiser; it was a cargo of wheat from Alexandria which St Paul helped to jettison on one of his shipwrecks, as was also, in all probability, that of the “ship of Alexandria whose sign was Castor and Pollux,” named in the same narrative. General Gordon is quoted as having stated that the Sudan if properly settled would be capable of feeding the whole of Europe. Along the north coast of Africa are areas which, if properly irrigated, as was done in the days of Carthage, could produce enough wheat to feed half of the Caucasian race. For instance, the vilayet of Tripoli, with an area of 400,000 sq. m., or three times the extent of Great Britain and Ireland, according to the opinion of a British consul, could raise millions of acres of wheat. The cereal flourishes on all the high plateaus of South Africa, from Cape Town to the Zambezi. Land is being extensively put under wheat in the pampas of South America and in the prairies of Siberia.

In the raising of the standard of farming to an English level the volume of the world’s crop would be trebled, another fact which Sir William Crookes seems to have overlooked. The experiments of the late Sir J. B. Lawes in Hertfordshire have proved that the natural fruitfulness of the wheat plant can be increased threefold by the application of the proper fertilizer. The results of these experiments will be found in a compendium issued from the Rothamsted Agricultural Experimental Station.

It is by no means, however, the wheat which yields the greatest number of bushels per acre which is the most valuable from a miller’s standpoint, for the thinness of the bran and the fineness and strength of the flour are with him important considerations, too often overlooked by the farmer when buying his seed. Nevertheless it is the deficient quantity of the wheat raised in the British Islands, and not the quality of the grain, which has been the cause of so much anxiety to economists and statesmen.

Sir J. Caird, writing in the year 1880, expressed the opinion that arable land in Great Britain would always command a substantial rent of at least 30s. per acre. His figures were based on the assumption that wheat was imported Freight rates. duty free. He calculated that the cost of carriage from abroad of wheat, or the equivalent of the product of an acre of good wheat land in Great Britain, would not be less than 30s. per ton. But freights had come down by 1900 to half the rates predicated by Caird; indeed, during a portion of the interval they ruled very close to zero, as far as steamer freights from America were concerned. In 1900 an all-round freight rate for wheat might be taken at 15s. per ton (a ton representing approximately the produce of an acre of good wheat land in England), say from 10s. for Atlantic American and Russian, to 30s. for Pacific American and Australian; about midway between these two extremes we find Indian and Argentine, the greatest bulk coming at about the 15s. rate. Inferior land bearing less than 4½ quarters per acre would not be protected to the same extent, and moreover, seeing that a portion of the British wheat crop has to stand a charge as heavy for land carriage across a county as that borne by foreign wheat across a continent or an ocean, the protection is not nearly so substantial as Caird would make out. The compilation showing the changes in the rates of charges for the railway and other transportation services issued by the Division of Statistics, Department of Agriculture, U.S.A. (Miscellaneous series, Bulletin No. 15, 1898), is a valuable reference book. From its pages are culled the following facts relating to the changes in the rates of freight up to the year 1897.1 In Table 3 the average rates per ton per mile in cents are shown since 1846. For the Fitchburg Railroad the rate for that year was 4.523 cents per ton per mile, since when a great and almost continuous fall has been taking place, until in 1897, the latest year given, the rate had declined to .870 of a cent per ton per mile. The railway which shows the greatest fall is the Chesapeake & Ohio, for the charge has fallen from over 7 cents in 1862 and 1863 to .419 of a cent in 1897, whereas the Erie rates have fallen only from 1.948 in 1852 to .609 in 1897. Putting the rates of the twelve returning railways together, we find the average freight in the two years 1859-1860 was 3.006 cents per ton per mile, and that in 1896-1897 the average rate had fallen to .797 of a cent per ton per mile. This difference is very large compared with the smallness of the unit. Coming to the rates on grain, we find (in Table 23) a record for the forty years 1858-1897 of the charge on wheat from Chicago to New York, via all rail from 1858, and via lake and rail since 1868, the authority being the secretary of the Chicago Board of Trade. From 1858 to 1862 the rate varied between 42.37 and 34.80 cents per bushel for the whole trip of roundly 1000 m., the average rate in the quinquennium being 38.43. In the five years immediately prior to the time at which Sir J. Caird expressed the opinion that the cost of carriage from abroad would always protect the British grower, the average all-rail freight from Chicago to New York was 17.76 cents, while the summer rate (partly by water) was 13.17 cents. These rates in 1897, the last year shown on the table, had fallen to 12.50 and 7.42 respectively. The rates have been as follows in quinquennial periods, via all rail:—

Chicago to New York in Cents per Bushel.

1858- 1862. 1863- 1867. 1868- 1872. 1873- 1877. 1878- 1882. 1883- 1887. 1888- 1892. 1893- 1897.

38.43 31.42 27.91 21.29 16.77 14.67 14.52 12.88

Calculating roundly a cent as equal to a halfpenny, and eight bushels to the quarter, the above would appear in English currency as follows:—

Chicago to New York in Shillings and Pence per Quarter.

1858- 1862. 1863- 1867. 1868- 1872. 1873- 1877. 1878- 1882. 1883- 1887. 1888- 1892. 1893- 1897.

s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d.

12 8 10 6 9 3 7 1 5 7 4 10½ 4 10 4 3

Another table (No. 38) shows the average rates from Chicago to New York by lakes, canal and river. These in their quinquennial periods are given for the season as follows:—

In Cents per Bushel of 60 ℔.

1857-1861. 1876-1880. 1893-1897.

22.15 10.47 4.92

In Shillings and Pence per Quarter of 480 ℔.

1857-1861. 1876-1880. 1893-1897.

s. d. s. d. s. d.

7 4 3 6 1 7

In Shillings and Pence per Ton of 2240 ℔.

1857-1861. 1876-1880. 1893-1897.

s. d. s. d. s. d.

34 6 16 6 7 6

This latter mode is the cheapest by which grain can be carried to the eastern seaboard from the American prairies, and it can now be done at a cost of 7s. 6d. per ton. The ocean freight has to be added before the grain can be delivered free on the quay at Liverpool. A rate from New York to Liverpool of 2½d. per bushel, or 7s. 10d. per ton, a low rate, reached in Dec. 1900, is yet sufficiently high, it is claimed, to leave a profit; indeed, there have frequently been times when the rate was as low as 1d. per bushel, or 3s. 1d. per ton; and in periods of great trade depression wheat is carried from New York to Liverpool as ballast, being paid for by the ship-owner. Another route worked more cheaply than formerly is that by river, from the centre of the winter wheat belt, say at St Louis, to New Orleans, and thence by steamer to Liverpool. The river rate has fallen below five cents per bushel, or 7s. per ton, 2240 ℔. In Table No. 71 the cost of transportation is compared year by year with the export price of the two leading cereals in the States as follows:—

Wheat and Corn—Export Prices and Transportation Rates compared.

Year. Wheat. Corn.

Export Price per Bushel. Rate, Chicago to New York by Lake and Canal, per Bushel. Number of Bushels carried for Price of One Bushel. Export Price per Bushel. Rate, Chicago to New York by Lake and Canal, per Bushel. Number of Bushels carried for Price of One Bushel.

Cents. Cents.

1867 $0.92 15.95 5.77 $0.72 14.58 4.94

1868 1.36 16.23 8.38 .84.1 13.57 6.20

1869 1.05 17.20 6.10 .72.8 14.98 4.86

1870 1.12 14.85 7.54 .80.5 13.78 5.84

1871 1.18 17.75 6.65 .67.9 16.53 4.11

1872 1.31 21.55 6.08 .61.8 19.62 3.15

1873 1.15 16.89 6.81 .54.3 15.39 3.53

1874 1.29 12.75 10.12 .64.7 11.29 5.73

1875 .97 9.90 9.80 .73.8 8.93 8.26

1876 1.11 8.63 12.86 .60.3 7.93 7.60

1877 1.12 10.76 10.41 .56.0 9.41 5.95

1878 1.33 9.10 14.62 .55.8 8.27 6.75

1879 1.07 11.60 9.22 .47.1 10.43 4.52

1880 1.25 12.27 10.19 .54.3 11.14 4.87

1881 1.11 8.19 13.55 .55.2 7.26 7.60

1882 1.19 7.89 15.08 .66.8 7.23 9.24

1883 1.13 8.37 13.50 .68.4 7.66 8.93

1884 1.07 6.31 16.96 .61.1 5.64 10.83

1885 .86 5.87 14.65 .54.0 5.38 10.04

1886 .87 8.71 9.99 .49.8 7.98 6.24

1887 .89 8.51 10.46 .47.9 7.88 6.08

1888 .85 5.93 14.33 .55.0 5.41 10.17

1889 .90 6.89 13.06 .47.4 6.19 7.66

1890 .83 5.86 14.16 .41.8 5.10 8.20

1891 .93 5.96 15.60 .57.4 5.36 10.71

1892 1.03 5.61 18.36 .55 5.03 10.93

1893 .80 6.31 12.68 .53 5.71 9.28

1894 .67 4.44 15.09 .46 3.99 11.53

1895 .58 4.11 14.11 .53 3.71 14.29

1896 .65 5.38 12.08 .38 4.94 7.69

1897 .75 4.35 17.24 .31 3.79 8.18

The farmers of the United States have now to meet a greatly increased output from Canada—the cost of transport from that country to England being much the same as from the United States. So much improved is the position of the farmer in North America compared with what it was about 1870, that the transport companies in 1901 carried 17¼ bushels of his grain to the seaboard in exchange for the value of one bushel, whereas in 1867 he had to give up one bushel in every six in return for the service. As regards the British farmer, it does not appear as if he had improved his position; for he has to send his wheat to greater distances, owing to the collapse of many country millers or their removal to the seaboard, while railway rates have fallen only to a very small extent; again the farmer’s wheat is worth only half of what it was formerly; it may be said that the British farmer has to give up one bushel in nine to the railway company for the purpose of transportation, whereas in the ’seventies he gave up one in eighteen only. Enough has been said to prove that the advantage of position claimed for the British farmer by Caird was somewhat illusory. Speaking broadly, the Kansas or Minnesota farmer’s wheat does not have to pay for carriage to Liverpool more than 2s. 6d. to 7s. 6d. per ton in excess of the rate paid by a Yorkshire farmer; this, it will be admitted, does not go very far towards enabling the latter to pay rent, tithes and rates and taxes.

The subject of the rates of ocean carriage at different periods requires consideration if a proper understanding of the working of the foreign grain trade is to be obtained. Only a very small proportion of the decline in the price of wheat since 1880 is due to cheapened transport rates; for while the mileage rate has been falling, the length of haulage has been extending, until in 1900 the principal wheat fields of America were 2000 m. farther from the eastern seaboard than was the case in 1870, and consequently, notwithstanding the fall in the mileage rate of 50 to 75%, it still costs the United Kingdom nearly as much to have its quota of foreign wheat fetched from abroad as it did then. The difference in the cost of the operation is shown in the following tabular statement, both the cost in the aggregate on a year’s imports and the cost per quarter:—

Quantity of Wheat and Wheaten Flour (as wheat) imported into the United Kingdom from various sources during the calendar year 1900, together with the average rate of freight.

1900.

Countries of Origin. Quantities. Qrs. 480 ℔ Ocean Freight to United Kingdom. Per 480 ℔. Total Cost of Ocean Carriage.

s. d. £

Atlantic America 11,171,100 2 3 1,257,100

South Russia 569,000 2 2 62,000

Pacific America 2,389,900 8 1 966,000

Canada 1,877,100 2 8 250,000

Rumania 176,400 2 6 22,000

Argentina and Uruguay 4,322,300 4 10 1,045,000

France 251,900 1 3 16,000

Bulgaria and Rumelia 30,600 2 6 4,000

India 2,200 4 0 400

Austria-Hungary 389,300 1 9 34,000

Chile 600 .. ..

North Russia 462,700 1 6 35,000

Germany 438,700 1 6 33,000

Australasia 883,900 6 5 284,000

Minor Countries 225,100 2 6 28,000

Total 23,190,800 Average 3s. 6d. £4,036,500

Comparing these figures with a similar statement for the year 1872, the most remote year for which similar facts are available, it will be found that the actual total cost per quarter for ocean carriage has not much decreased.

Quantity of Wheat and Wheaten Flour (as wheat) imported into the United Kingdom from various sources during the calendar year 1872, together with the average rate of freight.

1872.

Countries of Origin. Quantities. Qrs. Ocean Freight to United Kingdom. Per qr. Total Cost of Carriage.

s. d. £

South Russia 3,678,000 8 6 1,563,000

United States 2,030,000 6 6 659,000

Germany 910,000 2 0 91,000

France 660,000 3 0 99,000

Egypt 536,000 4 6 120,000

North Russia 490,000 2 0 49,000

Canada 400,000 7 6 150,000

Chile 330,000 12 0 198,000

Turkey 195,000 7 6 72,000

Spain 130,000 3 6 23,000

Scandinavia 160,000 2 0 16,000

Total, Chief Countries 9,519,000 Average 6s. 5d. £3,040,000

N.B.—A trifling quantity of Californian and Australian wheat was imported in the period in question, but the Board of Trade records do not distinguish the quantities, therefore they cannot be given. The freight in that year from those countries averaged about 13s. per quarter.

The exact difference between the average freight for the years 1872 and 1900 amounts to about 2s. 11d. per quarter (480 ℔), a trifle in comparison with the actual fall in the price of wheat during the same years.

The following data bearing upon the subject, for selected periods, are partly taken from the Corn Trade Year-Book:—

Year. United Kingdom Annual Imports. Wheat and Flour. Qrs. Ocean Freight to United ingdom. Per qr. Aggregate Cost of Carriage.

s. d. £

1872 9,469,000 6 5 3,040,000

1882 14,850,000 7 4 5,420,000

1894 16,229,000 3 9 3,041,000

1895 25,197,000 3 0 3,825,000

1896 23,431,000 2 9 3,258,000

1900 23,196,000 3 6 4,036,000

In passing, it may be pointed out that for a period of four years, from 1871 to 1874, the price of wheat averaged 56s. per quarter (or 7s. per bushel), with the charge for ocean carriage at 6s. 5d. per quarter, whereas in 1901 wheat was sold in England at 28s. (or 3s. 6d. per bushel), and the charge for ocean carriage was 3s. 6d. per quarter; the ocean transport companies carried eight bushels of wheat across the seas in 1901 for the value of one bushel, or exactly at the same ratio as in 1872.

The contrast between the case of railway freight and ocean freight is to be explained by the greater length of the present ocean voyage, which now extends to 10,000 miles in the case of Europe’s importation of white wheat from the Pacific Coast of the United States and Australia, in contrast with the short voyage from the Black Sea or across the English Channel or German Ocean. It is largely due to the overlooking of this phase of the question that an American statistician has fallen into the error of stating that about 16s. per quarter of the fall in the price of wheat, which happened between 1880 and 1894, is attributable to the lessened cost of transport.

Wheat Prices

The following figures show the fluctuations from year to year of English wheat, chiefly according to a record published by Mr T. Smith, Melford, the period covered being from 1656 to 1905:

Price per Quarter

s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d.

1656 38 2 1706 23 1 1756 40 1 1806 79 1 1856 69 2

1657 41 5 1707 25 4 1757 53 4 1807 75 4 1857 56 4

1658 57 9 1708 36 10 1758 44 5 1808 84 4 1858 44 2

1659 58 8 1709 69 9 1759 35 3 1809 97 4 1859 43 9

1660 50 2 1710 69 4 1760 32 5 1810 106 5 1860 53 3

1661 62 2 1711 48 0 1761 26 9 1811 95 3 1861 55 4

1662 65 9 1712 41 2 1762 34 8 1812 126 6 1862 55 5

1663 50 8 1713 45 4 1763 36 1 1813 109 9 1863 44 9

1664 36 0 1714 44 9 1764 41 5 1814 74 4 1864 40 2

1665 43 10 1715 38 2 1765 48 0 1815 65 7 1865 41 10

1666 32 0 1716 42 8 1766 43 1 1816 78 6 1866 49 11

1667 32 0 1717 40 7 1767 57 4 1817 96 11 1867 64 5

1668 35 6 1718 34 6 1768 53 9 1818 86 3 1868 63 9

1669 39 5 1719 31 1 1769 40 7 1819 74 6 1869 48 2

1670 37 0 1720 32 10 1770 43 6 1820 67 10 1870 46 11

1671 37 4 1721 33 4 1771 47 2 1821 56 1 1871 56 8

1672 36 5 1722 32 0 1772 50 8 1822 44 7 1872 57 0

1673 41 5 1723 30 10 1773 51 0 1823 53 4 1873 58 8

1674 61 0 1724 32 10 1774 52 8 1824 63 11 1874 55 9

1675 57 5 1725 43 1 1775 48 4 1825 68 6 1875 45 2

1676 33 9 1726 40 10 1776 38 2 1826 58 8 1876 46 2

1677 37 4 1727 37 4 1777 45 6 1827 60 6 1877 56 9

1678 52 5 1728 48 5 1778 42 0 1828 60 5 1878 46 5

1679 53 4 1729 41 7 1779 33 8 1829 66 3 1879 43 10

1680 40 0 1730 32 5 1780 35 8 1830 64 3 1880 44 4

1681 41 5 1731 29 2 1781 44 8 1831 66 4 1881 45 4

1682 39 1 1732 23 8 1782 47 10 1832 58 8 1882 45 1

1683 35 6 1733 25 2 1783 52 8 1833 52 11 1883 41 7

1684 39 1 1734 34 6 1784 48 10 1834 46 2 1884 35 8

1685 41 5 1735 38 2 1785 51 10 1835 49 4 1885 32 10

1686 30 2 1736 35 10 1786 38 10 1836 48 6 1886 31 0

1687 22 4 1737 33 9 1787 41 2 1837 55 0 1887 32 6

1688 40 10 1738 31 6 1788 45 0 1838 64 7 1888 31 10

1689 26 8 1739 34 2 1789 51 2 1839 70 8 1889 29 9

1690 30 9 1740 45 1 1790 54 9 1840 66 4 1890 31 11

1691 30 2 1741 41 5 1791 48 7 1841 64 4 1891 37 0

1692 41 5 1742 30 2 1792 43 0 1842 57 3 1892 30 3

1693 60 1 1743 22 1 1793 49 3 1843 50 1 1893 26 4

1694 56 10 1744 22 1 1794 52 3 1844 51 3 1894 22 10

1695 47 1 1745 24 5 1795 75 2 1845 50 10 1895 23 1

1696 63 1 1746 34 8 1796 78 7 1846 54 8 1896 26 2

1697 53 4 1747 30 11 1797 53 9 1847 69 9 1897 30 2

1698 60 9 1748 32 10 1798 51 10 1848 50 6 1898 34 0

1699 56 10 1749 32 10 1799 69 0 1849 44 3 1899 25 8

1700 35 6 1750 28 10 1800 113 10 1850 40 3 1900 26 11

1701 33 5 1751 34 2 1801 119 6 1851 38 6 1901 26 9

1702 26 2 1752 37 2 1802 69 10 1852 40 9 1902 28 1

1703 32 0 1753 39 8 1803 58 10 1853 53 3 1903 26 9

1704 41 4 1754 30 9 1804 62 3 1854 72 5 1904 28 4

1705 26 8 1755 30 1 1805 89 9 1855 74 8 1905 29 8

Average 50 years 42 10 36 0 51 9 65 10 *42 7

* Average for 46 years only.

Thus, whatever the cause of the decline in the price of wheat may be, it cannot be attributed solely to the fall in the rate of rail or ocean freights. Incidental charges are lower than they were in 1870; handling charges, brokers’ commissions and insurance premiums have been in many instances reduced, but all these economies when combined only amount to about 2s. per quarter. Now if we add together all these savings in the rate of rail and ocean freights and incidental expenses, we arrive at an aggregate economy of 8s. per quarter, or not one-third of the actual difference between the average price of wheat in 1872 and 1900. To what the remaining difference was due it is difficult to say with certitude; there are some who argue that the tendency of prices to fall is inherent, and that the constant whittling away of intermediaries’ profits is sufficient explanation, while bi-metallists have maintained that the phenomenon is clearly to be traced to the action of the German government in demonetizing silver in 1872.

1 Valuable information will also be found in Bulletin No. 38 (1905), “Crop Export Movement and Port Facilities on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts”; in Bulletin No. 49 (1907), “Cost of Hauling Crops from Farms to Shipping Points”; and in Bulletin No. 69 (1908), “European Grain Trade.”

GRAM, or Chick-pea, called also Egyptian pea, or Bengal gram (from Port. grão, formerly gram, Lat. granum, Hindi Chanā, Bengali Chholā, Ital. cece, Span. garbanzo), the Cicer arietinum of Linnaeus, so named from the resemblance of its seed to a ram’s head. It is a member of the natural order Leguminosae, largely cultivated as a pulse-food in the south of Europe, Egypt and western Asia as far as India, but is not known undoubtedly wild. The plant is an annual herb with flexuose branches, and alternately arranged pinnately compound leaves, with small, oval, serrated leaflets and small eared stipules. The flowers are borne singly in the leaf-axils on a stalk about half the length of the leaf and jointed and bent in the middle; the corolla is blue-purple. The inflated pod, 1 to 1½ in. long, contains two roundish seeds. It was cultivated by the Greeks in Homer’s time under the name erebinthos, and is also referred to by Dioscorides as krios from the resemblance of the pea to the head of a ram. The Romans called it cicer, from which is derived the modern names given to it in the south of Europe. Names, more or less allied to one another, are in vogue among the peoples of the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, Armenia and Persia, and there is a Sanskrit name and several others analogous or different in modern Indian languages. The plant has been cultivated in Egypt from the beginning of the Christian era, but there is no proof that it was known to the ancient Egyptians. Alphonse de Candolle (Origin of Cultivated Plants, p. 325) suggests that the plant originally grew wild in the countries to the south of the Caucasus and to the north of Persia. “The western Aryans (Pelasgians, Hellenes) perhaps introduced the plant into southern Europe, where, however, there is some probability that it was also indigenous. The western Aryans carried it to India.” Gram is largely cultivated in the East, where the seeds are eaten raw or cooked in various ways, both in their ripe and unripe condition, and when roasted and ground subserve the same purposes as ordinary flour. In Europe the seeds are used as an ingredient in soups. They contain, in 100 parts without husks, nitrogenous substances 22.7, fat 3.76, starch 63.18, mineral matters 2.6 parts, with water (Forbes Watson, quoted in Parkes’s Hygiene). The liquid which exudes from the glandular hairs clothing the leaves and stems of the plant, more especially during the cold season when the seeds ripen, contains a notable proportion of oxalic acid. In Mysore the dew containing it is collected by means of cloths spread on the plant over night, and is used in domestic medicine. The steam of water in which the fresh plant is immersed is in the Deccan resorted to by the Portuguese for the treatment of dysmenorrhoea. The seed of Phaseolus Mungo, or green gram (Hind. and Beng. moong), a form of which plant with black seeds (P. Max of Roxburgh) is termed black gram, is an important article of diet among the labouring classes in India. The meal is an excellent substitute for soap, and is stated by Elliot to be an invariable concomitant of the Hindu bath. A variety, var. radiatus (P. Roxburghii, W. and Arn., or P. radiatus, Roxb.) (vern. urid, māshkalāi), also known as green gram, is perhaps the most esteemed of the leguminous plants of India, where the meal of its seed enters into the composition of the more delicate cakes and dishes. Horse gram, Dolichos biflorus (vern. kulthi), which supplies in Madras the place of the chick-pea, affords seed which, when boiled, is extensively employed as a food for horses and cattle in South India, where also it is eaten in curries.

See W. Elliot, “On the Farinaceous Grains and the various kinds of Pulses used in Southern India,” Edin. New Phil. Journ. xvi. (1862) 16 sq.; H. Drury, The Useful Plants of India (1873); U. C. Dutt, Materia Medica of the Hindus (Calcutta, 1877); G. Watt, Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1890).

GRAMMAR (from Lat. grammatica, sc. ars; Gr. γράμμα, letter, from γράφειν, to write). By the grammar of a language is meant either the relations borne by the words of a sentence and by sentences themselves one to another, or the systematized exposition of these. The exposition may be, and frequently is, incorrect; but it always presupposes the existence of certain customary uses of words when in combination. In what follows, therefore, grammar will be generally employed in its primary sense, as denoting the mode in which words are connected in order to express a complete thought, or, as it is termed in logic, a proposition.

The object of language is to convey thought, and so long as this object is attained the machinery for attaining it is of comparatively slight importance. The way in which we combine our words and sentences matters Scope of grammar. little, provided that our meaning is clear to others. The expressions “horseflesh” and “flesh of a horse” are equally intelligible to an Englishman and therefore are equally recognized by English grammar. The Chinese manner of denoting a genitive is by placing the defining word before that which it defines, as in koue jin, “man of the kingdom,” literally “kingdom man,” and the only reason why it would be incorrect in French or Italian is that such a combination would be unintelligible to a Frenchman or an Italian. Hence it is evident that the grammatical correctness or incorrectness of an expression depends upon its intelligibility, that is to say, upon the ordinary use and custom of a particular language. Whatever is so unfamiliar as not to be generally understood is also ungrammatical. In other words, it is contrary to the habit of a language, as determined by common usage and consent.

In this way we can explain how it happens that the grammar of a cultivated dialect and that of a local dialect in the same country so frequently disagree. Thus, in the dialect of West Somerset, thee is the nominative of the second personal pronoun, while in cultivated English the plural accusative you (A.-S. eow) has come to represent a nominative singular. Both are grammatically correct within the sphere of their respective dialects, but no further. You would be as ungrammatical in West Somerset as thee is in classical English; and both you and thee, as nominatives singular, would have been equally ungrammatical in Early English. Grammatical propriety is nothing more than the established usage of a particular body of speakers at a particular time in their history.

It follows from this that the grammar of a people changes, like its pronunciation, from age to age. Anglo-Saxon or Early English grammar is not the grammar of Modern English, any more than Latin grammar is the grammar of modern Italian; and to defend an unusual construction or inflexion on the ground that it once existed in literary Anglo-Saxon is as wrong as to import a peculiarity of some local dialect into the grammar of the cultivated speech. It further follows that different languages will have different grammars, and that the differences will be more or less according to the nearer or remoter relationship of the languages themselves and the modes of thought of those who speak them. Consequently, to force the grammatical framework of one language upon another is to misconceive the whole nature of the latter and seriously to mislead the learner. Chinese grammar, for instance, can never be understood until we discard, not only the terminology of European grammar, but the very conceptions which underlie it, while the polysynthetic idioms of America defy all attempts to discover in them “the parts of speech” and the various grammatical ideas which occupy so large a place in our school-grammars. The endeavour to find the distinctions of Latin grammar in that of English has only resulted in grotesque errors, and a total misapprehension of the usage of the English language.

It is to the Latin grammarians—or, more correctly, to the Greek grammarians, upon whose labours those of the Latin writers were based—that we owe the classification of the subjects with which grammar is commonly supposed Subdivision of grammar. to deal. The grammar of Dionysius Thrax, which he wrote for Roman schoolboys in the time of Pompey, has formed the starting-point for the innumerable school-grammars which have since seen the light, and suggested that division of the matter treated of which they have followed. He defines grammar as a practical acquaintance with the language of literary men, and as divided into six parts—accentuation and phonology, explanation of figurative expressions, definition, etymology, general rules of flexion and critical canons. Of these, phonology and accentuation, or prosody, can properly be included in grammar only in so far as the construction of a sentence and the grammatical meaning of a word are determined by accent or letter-change; the accentual difference in English, for example, between íncense and incénse belongs to the province of grammar, since it indicates a difference between noun and verb; and the changes of vowel in the Semitic languages, by which various nominal and verbal forms are distinguished from one another, constitute a very important part of their grammatical machinery. But where accent and pronunciation do not serve to express the relations of words in a sentence, they fall into the domain of phonology, not of grammar. The explanation of figurative expressions, again, must be left to the rhetorician, and definition to the lexicographer; the grammarian has no more to do with them than he has with the canons of criticism.

In fact, the old subdivision of grammar, inherited from the grammarians of Rome and Alexandria, must be given up and a new one put in its place. What grammar really deals with are all those contrivances whereby the relations of words and sentences are pointed out. Sometimes it is position, sometimes phonetic symbolization, sometimes composition, sometimes flexion, sometimes the use of auxiliaries, which enables the speaker to combine his words in such a way that they shall be intelligible to another. Grammar may accordingly be divided into the three departments of composition or “word-building,” syntax and accidence, by which is meant an exposition of the means adopted by language for expressing the relations of grammar when recourse is not had to composition or simple position.

A systematized exposition of grammar may be intended for the purely practical purpose of teaching the mechanism of a foreign language. In this case all that is necessary is a correct and complete statement of the facts. But Modes of treatment. a correct and complete statement of the facts is by no means so easy a matter as might appear at first sight. The facts will be distorted by a false theory in regard to them, while they will certainly not be presented in a complete form if the grammarian is ignorant of the true theory they presuppose. The Semitic verb, for example, remains unintelligible so long as the explanation of its forms is sought in the conjugation of the Aryan verb, since it has no tenses in the Aryan sense of the word, but denotes relation and not time.

A good practical grammar of a language, therefore, should be based on a correct appreciation of the facts which it expounds, and a correct appreciation of the facts is only possible where they are examined and co-ordinated in accordance with the scientific method. A practical grammar ought, wherever it is possible, to be preceded by a scientific grammar.

Comparison is the instrument with which science works, and a scientific grammar, accordingly, is one in which the comparative method has been applied to the relations of speech. If we would understand the origin and real nature of grammatical forms, and of the relations which they represent, we must compare them with similar forms in kindred dialects and languages, as well as with the forms under which they appeared themselves at an earlier period of their history. We shall thus have a comparative grammar and an historical grammar, the latter being devoted to tracing the history of grammatical forms and usages in the same language. Of course, an historical grammar is only possible where a succession of written records exists; where a language possesses no older literature we must be content with a comparative grammar only, and look to cognate idioms to throw light upon its grammatical peculiarities. In this case we have frequently to leave whole forms unexplained, or at most conjecturally interpreted, since the machinery by means of which the relations of grammar are symbolized is often changed so completely during the growth of a language as to cause its earlier shape and character to be unrecognizable. Moreover, our area of comparison must be as wide as possible; where we have but two or three languages to compare, we are in danger of building up conclusions on insufficient evidence. The grammatical errors of the classical philologists of the 18th century were in great measure due to the fact that their area of comparison was confined to Latin and Greek.

The historical grammar of a single language or dialect, which traces the grammatical forms and usages of the language as far back as documentary evidence allows, affords material to the comparative grammarian, whose task it is to compare the grammatical forms and usages of an allied group of tongues and thereby reduce them to their earliest forms and senses. The work thus carried out by the comparative grammarian within a particular family of languages is made use of by universal grammar, the object of which is to determine the ideas that underlie all grammar whatsoever, as distinct from those that are peculiar to special families of speech. Universal grammar is sometimes known as “the metaphysics of language,” and it has to decide such questions as the nature of gender or of the verb, the true purport of the genitive relation, or the origin of grammar itself. Such questions, it is clear, can only be answered by comparing the results gained by the comparative treatment of the grammars of various groups of language. What historical grammar is to comparative grammar, comparative grammar is to universal grammar.

Universal grammar, as founded on the results of the scientific study of speech, is thus essentially different from that “universal grammar” so much in vogue at the beginning of the 19th century, which consisted of a series of a priori Universal grammar. assumptions based on the peculiarities of European grammar and illustrated from the same source. But universal grammar, as conceived by modern science, is as yet in its infancy; its materials are still in the process of being collected. The comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages is alone in an advanced state, those of the Semitic idioms, of the Finno-Ugrian tongues and of the Bantu dialects of southern Africa are still in a backward condition; and the other families of speech existing in the world, with the exception of the Malayo-Polynesian and the Sonorian of North America, have not as yet been treated scientifically. Chinese, it is true, possesses an historical grammar, and Van Eys, in his comparative grammar of Basque, endeavoured to solve the problems of that interesting language by a comparison of its various dialects; but in both cases the area of comparison is too small for more than a limited success to be attainable. Instead of attempting the questions of universal grammar, therefore, it will be better to confine our attention to three points—the fundamental differences in the grammatical conceptions of different groups of languages, the main results of a scientific investigation of Indo-European grammar, and the light thrown by comparative philology upon the grammar of our own tongue.

The proposition or sentence is the unit and starting-point of speech, and grammar, as we have seen, consists in the relations of its several parts one to another, together with the expression of them. These relations may be regarded Differences in grammar of unallied languages. from various points of view. In the polysynthetic languages of America the sentence is conceived as a whole, not composed of independent words, but, like the thought which it expresses, one and indivisible. What we should denote by a series of words is consequently denoted by a single long compound—kuligatchis in Delaware, for instance, signifying “give me your pretty little paw,” and aglekkigiartorasuarnipok in Eskimo, “he goes away hastily and exerts himself to write.” Individual words can be, and often are, extracted from the sentence; but in this case they stand, as it were, outside it, being represented by a pronoun within the sentence itself. Thus, in Mexican, we can say not only ni-sotsi-temoa, “I look for flowers,” but also ni-k-temoa sotsitl, where the interpolated guttural is the objective pronoun. As a necessary result of this conception of the sentence the American languages possess no true verb, each act being expressed as a whole by a single word. In Cherokee, for example, while there is no verb signifying “to wash” in the abstract, no less than thirteen words are used to signify every conceivable mode and object of washing. In the incorporating languages, again, of which Basque may be taken as a type, the object cannot be conceived except as contained in the verbal action. Hence every verbal form embodies an objective pronoun, even though the object may be separately expressed. If we pass to an isolating language like Chinese, we find the exact converse of that which meets us in the polysynthetic tongues. Here each proposition or thought is analysed into its several elements, and these are set over against one another as so many independent words. The relations of grammar are consequently denoted by position, the particular position of two or more words determining the relation they bear to each other. The analysis of the sentence has not been carried so far in agglutinative languages like Turkish. In these the relations of grammar are represented by individual words, which, however, are subordinated to the words expressing the main ideas intended to be in relation to one another. The defining words, or indices of grammatical relations, are, in a large number of instances, placed after the words which they define; in some cases, however, as, for example, in the Bantu languages of southern Africa, the relation is conceived from the opposite point of view, the defining words being prefixed. The inflexional languages call in the aid of a new principle. The relations of grammar are denoted symbolically either by a change of vowel or by a change of termination, more rarely by a change at the beginning of a word. Each idea, together with the relation which it bears to the other ideas of a proposition, is thus represented by a single word; that is to say, the ideas which make up the elements of a sentence are not conceived severally and independently, as in Chinese, but as always having a certain connexion with one another. Inflexional languages, however, tend to become analytical by the logical separation of the flexion from the idea to which it is attached, though the primitive point of view is never altogether discarded, and traces of flexion remain even in English and Persian. In fact, there is no example of a language which has wholly forsaken the conception of the sentence and the relation of its elements with which it started, although each class of languages occasionally trespasses on the grammatical usages of the others. In language, as elsewhere in nature, there are no sharp lines of division, no sudden leaps; species passes insensibly into species, class into class. At the same time the several types of speech—polysynthetic, isolating, agglutinative and inflexional—remain clear and fixed; and even where two languages belong to the same general type, as, for instance, an Indo-European and a Semitic language in the inflexional group, or a Bantu and a Turkish language in the agglutinative group, we find no certain example of grammatical interchange. A mixed grammar, in which the grammatical procedure of two distinct families of speech is intermingled, is almost, if not altogether, unknown.

It is obvious, therefore, that grammar constitutes the surest and most important basis for a classification of languages. Words may be borrowed freely by one dialect from another, or, though originally unrelated, may, by the action of phonetic decay, come to assume the same forms, while the limited number of articulate sounds and conceptions out of which language was first developed, and the similarity of the circumstances by which the first speakers were everywhere surrounded, naturally produce a resemblance between the roots of many unconnected tongues. Where, however, the fundamental conceptions of grammar and the machinery by which they are expressed are the same, we may have no hesitation in inferring a common origin.

The main results of scientific inquiry into the origin and primitive meaning of the forms of Indo-European grammar may be summed up as follows. We start with stems or themes, by which are meant words of two or Forms of Indo-European grammar. more syllables which terminate in a limited number of sounds. These stems can be classed in groups of two kinds, one in which the groups consist of stems of similar meanings and similar initial syllables, and another in which the final syllables alone coincide. In the first case we have what are termed roots, the simplest elements into which words can be decomposed; in the second case stems proper, which may be described as consisting of suffixes attached to roots. Roots, therefore, are merely the materials out of which speech can be made, the embodiments of isolated conceptions with which the lexicographer alone has to deal, whereas stems present us with words already combined in a sentence and embodying the relations of grammar. If we would rightly understand primitive Indo-European grammar, we must conceive it as having been expressed or implied in the suffixes of the stems, and in the order according to which the stems were arranged in a sentence. In other words, the relations of grammar were denoted partly by juxtaposition or syntax, partly by the suffixes of stems.

These suffixes were probably at first unmeaning, or rather clothed with vague significations, which changed according to the place occupied in the sentence by the stem to which they were joined. Gradually this vagueness of signification disappeared, and particular suffixes came to be set apart to represent particular relations of grammar. What had hitherto been expressed by mere position now attached itself to the terminations or suffixes of stems, which accordingly became full-grown words. Some of the suffixes denoted purely grammatical ideas, that is to say, were flexions; others were classificatory, serving to distinguish nouns from verbs, presents from aorists, objects from agents and the like; while others, again, remained unmeaning adjuncts of the root. This origin of the flexions explains the otherwise strange fact that the same suffix may symbolize wholly different grammatical relations. In Latin, for instance, the context and dictionary will alone tell us that mus-as is the accusative plural of a noun, and am-as the second person singular of a verb, or that mus-a is the nominative singular of a feminine substantive, bon-a the accusative plural of a neuter adjective. In short, the flexions were originally merely the terminations of stems which were adapted to express the various relations of words to each other in a sentence, as these gradually presented themselves to the consciousness and were extracted from what had been previously implied by position. Necessarily, the same suffix might be used sometimes in a classificatory, sometimes in a flexional sense, and sometimes without any definite sense at all. In the Greek dative-locative πόδ-εσ-σι, for example, the suffix -ες is classificatory; in the nominative πόδ-ες it is flexional.

When a particular termination or suffix once acquired a special sense, it would be separated in thought from the stem to which it belonged, and attached in the same sense to other stems and other terminations. Thus in modern English we can attach the suffix -ize to almost any word whatsoever, in order to give the latter a transitive meaning, and the Gr. πόδεσσι, quoted above, really contains no less than three suffixes, -ες, -συ and -ι, the last two both denoting the locative, and coalescing, through σϝι, into a single syllable -σι. The latter instance shows us how two or more suffixes denoting exactly the same idea may be tacked on one to another, if the original force and signification of the first of them comes to be forgotten. Thus, in O. Eng. sang-estre was the feminine of sang-ere, “singer,” but the meaning of the termination has so entirely died out of the memory that we have to add the Romanic -ess to it if we would still distinguish it from the masculine singer. A familiar example of the way in which the full sense of the exponent of a grammatical idea fades from the mind and has to be supplied by a new exponent is afforded by the use of expletives in conversational English to denote the superlative. “Very warm” expresses little more than the positive, and to represent the intensity of his feelings the Englishman has recourse to such expressions as “awfully warm” like the Ger. “schrecklich warm.”

Such words as “very,” “awfully,” “schrecklich,” illustrate a second mode in which Indo-European grammar has found means of expression. Words may lose their true signification and become the mere exponents of grammatical ideas. Professor Earle divides all words into presentive and symbolic, the former denoting objects and conceptions, the latter the relations which exist between these. Symbolic words, therefore, are what the Chinese grammarians call “empty words”—words, that is, which have been divested of their proper signification and serve a grammatical purpose only. Many of the classificatory and some of the flexional suffixes of Indo-European speech can be shown to have had this origin. Thus the suffix tar, which denotes names of kinship and agency, seems to come from the same root as the Lat. terminus and trans, our through, the Sans. tar-āmi, “I pass over,” and to have primarily signified “one that goes through” a thing. Thus, too, the Eng. head or hood, in words like godhead and brotherhood, is the A.-S. hâd, “character” or “rank”; dom, in kingdom, the A.-S. dôm, “judgment”; and lock or ledge, in wedlock and knowledge, the A.-S. lâc, “sport” or “gift.” In all these cases the “empty words,” after first losing every trace of their original significance, have followed the general analogy of the language and assumed the form and functions of the suffixes with which they had been confused.

A third mode of representing the relations of grammar is by the symbolic use of vowels and diphthongs. In Greek, for instance, the distinction between the reduplicated present δίδωμι and the reduplicated perfect δέδωκα is indicated by a distinction of vowel, and in primitive Aryan grammar the vowel â seems to have been set apart to denote the subjunctive mood just as ya or i was set apart to denote the potential. So, too, according to M. Hovelacque, the change of a into i or u in the parent Indo-European symbolized a change of meaning from passive to active. This symbolic use of the vowels, which is the purest application of the principle of flexion, is far less extensively carried out in the Indo-European than in the Semitic languages. The Semitic family of speech is therefore a much more characteristic type of the inflexional languages than is the Indo-European.

The primitive Indo-European noun possessed at least eight cases—nominative, accusative, vocative, instrumental, dative, genitive, ablative and locative. M. Bergaigne has attempted to show that the first three of these, the “strong cases” as they are termed, are really abstracts formed by the suffixes -as (-s), -an, -m, -t, -i, -â and -ya (-i), the plural being nothing more than an abstract singular, as may be readily seen by comparing words like the Gr. ἔπο-ς, and ὄπε-ς, which mean precisely the same. The remaining “weak” cases, formed by the suffixes -sma, -sya, -syâ, -yâ, -i, -an, -t, -bhi, -su, -i, -a and -â, are really adjectives and adverbs. No distinction, for example, can be drawn between “a cup of gold” and “a golden cup,” and the instrumental, the dative, the ablative and the locative are, when closely examined, merely adverbs attached to a verb. The terminations of the strong cases do not displace the accent of the stem to which they are suffixed; the suffixes of the weak cases, on the other hand, generally draw the accent upon themselves.

According to Hübschmann, the nominative, accusative and genitive cases are purely grammatical, distinguished from one another through the exigencies of the sentence only, whereas the locative, ablative and instrumental have a logical origin and determine the logical relation which the three other cases bear to each other and the verb. The nature of the dative is left undecided. The locative primarily denotes rest in a place, the ablative motion from a place, and the instrumental the means or concomitance of an action. The dative Hübschmann regards as “the case of the participant object.” Like Hübschmann, Holzweissig divides the cases into two classes—the one grammatical and the other logical; and his analysis of their primitive meaning is the same as that of Hübschmann, except as regards the dative, the primary sense of which he thinks to have been motion towards a place. This is also the view of Delbrück, who makes it denote tendency towards an object. Delbrück, however, holds that the primary sense of the ablative was that of separation, the instrumental originally indicating concomitance, while there was a double locative, one used like the ablative absolute in Latin, the other being a locative of the object.

The dual was older than the plural, and after the development of the latter survived as a merely useless encumbrance, of which most of the Indo-European languages contrived in time to get rid. There are still many savage idioms in which the conception of plurality has not advanced beyond that of duality. In the Bushman dialects, for instance, the plural, or rather that which is more than one, is expressed by repeating the word; thus tu is “mouth,” tutu “mouths.” It may be shown that most of the suffixes of the Indo-European dual are the longer and more primitive forms of those of the plural which have grown out of them by the help of phonetic decay. The plural of the weak cases, on the other hand (the accusative alone excepted), was identical with the singular of abstract nouns; so far as both form and meaning are concerned, no distinction can be drawn between ὄπες and ἔπος. Similarly, humanity and men signify one and the same thing, and the use of English words like sheep or fish for both singular and plural shows to what an extent our appreciation of number is determined by the context rather than by the form of the noun. The so-called “broken plurals” of Arabic and Ethiopic are really singular collectives employed to denote the plural.