When Greek and Latin had once been restored to their true place in the natural system of the Aryan languages, their special treatment, too, became necessarily a different one. In grammar, for instance, scholars were no longer satisfied to give forms and rules, and to place what was irregular by the side of what was regular. They wished to know the reasons of the rules as well as of the exceptions; they asked why the forms were such as they were, and not otherwise; they required not only a logical, but also an historical foundation of grammar. People asked themselves for the first time, why so small a change as _mensa_ and _mensæ_ could express the difference between one and many tables; why a single letter, like _r_, could possess the charm of changing I love, _amo_, into I am loved, _amor_. Instead of indulging in general speculations on the logic of grammar, the riddles of grammar received their solution from a study of the historical development of language. For every language there was to be a historical grammar, and in this way a revolution was produced in philological studies to be compared only to the revolution produced in chemistry by the discoveries of Lavoisier, or in geology by the theories of Lyell. For instance, instead of attempting an explanation why the genitive singular and the ablative plural of the first and second declensions could express rest in a place--_Romæ_, at Rome; _Tarenti_, at Tarentum; _Athenis_, at Athens; _Gabiis_, at Gabii--one glance at the past history of these languages showed that these so-called genitives were not and never had been genitives, but corresponded to the old locatives in _i_ and _su_ in Sanskrit. No doubt, a pupil can be made to learn anything that stands in a grammar; but I do not believe that it can conduce to a sound development of his intellectual powers if he first learns at school the real meaning of the genitive and ablative, and then has to accept on trust that, somehow or other, the same cases may express rest in a place. A well-known English divine, opposed to reform in spelling, as in everything else, once declared that the fearful orthography of English formed the best psychological foundation of English orthodoxy, because a child that had once been brought to believe that t-h-r-o-u-g-h sounded like “through,” t-h-o-u-g-h like “though,” r-o-u-g-h like “rough,” would afterwards believe anything. Be that as it may, I do not consider that grammatical rules like those just quoted on the genitive and ablative, assuming the power of the locative, are likely to strengthen the reasoning powers of any schoolboy.