But these words, though custom has rendered them familiar to us, “express perhaps the most subtle and refined abstractions which the mind of man is capable of forming.” His purpose through all this ingenious train of reasoning was to suggest a new mode of approaching a subject which, in itself so fascinating, had been reduced to a dull routine. He is very severe on the Minerva of Sanctius and on some other grammarians who, neglecting the progress of nature, had expended all their industry in drawing up a number of artificial rules so as to exclude exceptions. He sees that languages are the products not of art but of nature or circumstance. He explains how the modern dialects of Europe arose from conquest, migration, and mixture—through Lombards trying to speak Latin, or Normans trying to speak Saxon. In this way the older tongues were decomposed and simplified in their rudiments while they grew more complex in composition. The processes of linguistic development provoke a comparison of philology with mechanics:— “All machines are generally, when first invented, extremely complex in their principles, and there is often a particular principle of motion for every particular movement which, it is intended, they should perform. Succeeding improvers observe, that one principle may be so applied as to produce several of those movements, and thus the machine becomes gradually more and more simple, and produces its effects with fewer wheels, and fewer principles of motion. In Language, in the same manner, every case of every noun, and every tense of every verb, was originally expressed by a particular distinct word, which served for this purpose and for no other. But succeeding observation discovered that one set of words was capable of supplying the place of all that infinite number, and that four or five prepositions, and half a dozen auxiliary verbs, were capable of answering the end of all the declensions, and of all the conjugations in the antient Languages.” The comparison, however, suggests a contrast. The simplification of machines renders them more perfect, but the simplification of languages renders them more and more imperfect, and less proper (in his opinion) for many of the purposes of expression. Thus in a decomposed and simple language, he observes, we are often restrained from disposing words and sounds in the most agreeable order. When Virgil writes “Tityre tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi,”