Of the two chief explanations of the origin of inflection, one, the theory of adaptation, as held at the present time, answers the question by saying that “inflectional endings are not essentially different from word-building suffixes, but are rather to be regarded as word-building suffixes in a new rôle and partially systematized into paradigms. Inflection comes at the point--wherever in the long course of development that point may be--where the endings of two or more different forms of a word begin to be felt to be the carriers of relations of case, or of mode and tense, to a certain extent independently of stem and context. It is therefore not properly a matter of forms, but of meanings, and that theory which accounts for the meanings and for their association with forms explains inflection, whether it accounts for the forms or not.”[188] In other words, inflectional forms got their meanings in a manner similar to that we have illustrated in the case of our nouns. (1.) The apparent definiteness that case-endings have does depend largely on their stem-meaning. Many of the functional distinctions of case can be made only by the meaning of the nouns, _e. g._, in “gladiis pugnatum est”, Caes. B. G. 1, 52; “uno tempore omnibus locis pugnatur,” B. G. 7, 84; “pugnatum continenter horis quinque vario certamine,” B. C. 1, 46, we have five ablatives, expressing instrument, time when, duration of time, manner, and place, only because the words in the ablative are capable of these meanings. Just so, we saw that our nouns got their general meaning of instrument, place, result of action, etc., because their verb stems were such as to admit of such meaning. (2.) While our nouns naturally get an important part of their meaning from the verb stem, yet they derive great specialization of meaning from some element in the context. It is very probable, too, that originally our so-called inflectional system was in reality only a large number of undifferentiated forms which, by a process of centralization and adaptation, and influenced by the associations in which they were used, acquired their present meaning.