any means of supplying the place of one, except the employment of pronouns and particles. Mariner makes a similar remark respecting the Tonga language; and we may venture to affirm that there is not such a thing as a true verb substantive in any one member of the great Polynesian family. "It is true that the Malayan, Javanese and Malagassy grammarians talk of words signifying _to be_; but an attentive comparison of the elements which they profess to give as such, shows clearly that they are no verbs at all, but simply pronouns or indeclinable particles, commonly indicating the time, place or manner of the specified action or relation. It is not therefore easy to conceive how the mind of a Philippine islander, or of any other person, can supply a word totally unknown to it, and which there is not a particle of evidence to show that it ever thought of." Of the substitutes put in place of the substantive verb, by far the most common are pronouns, and particles indicating position. Thus in Coptic, the descendant of the ancient Egyptian, the demonstrative _pe_, "this," after a noun singular masculine, or _te_ when the noun is feminine, is equivalent to _is_; and _ne_, "these," after a plural, to _are_. In the ancient hieroglyphic monuments the function of the substantive verb is performed by the same means. Even in the Semitic languages, which have substantive verbs, pronouns are habitually used instead of them; so that _I I_, or _I he_, stands for _I am_, and _we we_ or _we they_, for _we are_. "Thou art my King" (Ps. 44, 5) is in the Hebrew "Thou _he_ my King;" "We are the servants of the God of heaven" (Ezra 5, 11) is in Chaldee "We _they_ servants of the God of heaven;" "I am the light of the world," is in Arabic "I _he_ the light of the world." Although such modes of expression are foreign to the Indo-European languages, even they furnish abundant evidence of the predicative power of pronouns and particles. If any word required to have inherent in it the peculiar affirmative power attributed to verbs, it is the word _yes_. Accordingly Tooke derives it from the French imperative _a-yez_: forgetting, or not knowing, that the Anglo-Saxon _gese_ or _yea_ (cognate with the Sanscrit pronoun _ya_) was in existence long before the French _ayez_. The fact is that Eng. _yes_, Ger. _ja_, and the corresponding words in the other European languages are oblique cases of demonstrative pronouns, and mean simply "in this (manner)," or "thus." The Italian _si_ (yes) is from Lat. _sic_, (thus); the Provençal _oc_ is from Lat. _hoc_; and the modern Fr. _oui_ was originally a combination of _hoc illo_, and passed through the stages of _ocil_ and _oil_ into its present form.