The simple form of the English language is the result of two causes. Of these the first in order of time was the conflict and subsequent mingling of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the Norman-French. When two languages are thus brought together and are both spoken by two peoples, all that is superfluous in the words of each soon begins to disappear. Each people grasps only the essential in the foreign words which it is obliged to use; each soon adopts the curtailed form of its speech used by the neighbors of another race and speech with whom it is obliged to live in daily communication; and ere long a composite speech of simpler forms takes the place of two tongues—each of which was more complex in structure, but less rich and varied in substance. By this process, out of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, came modern English. But not only thus. Other languages have mingled, but never before with such a result. Never was there in any other amalgamation, such an esurience of superfluous form; a devouring which has to all intents and purposes made English a language of one-formed words, and therefore a language practically without formal grammar. In this characteristic is its strength; from this comes its flexibility, its adaptation to all the needs of man, the highest and the lowest. Hence it is eminently the language of common sense as well as of the highest flights of poetry. The English mind saw that it was not necessary to have two words to express possession in the singular and in the plural; that _good_ as clearly expressed the goodness of a woman as of a man, and that of a dozen men as well as that of one; that pens and tables needed no distinction of gender in their names; in fact that nothing was gained, and that much was lost by these grammatical excrescences; and therefore they were done away with very thoroughly, almost entirely. The process was pretty well completed some three hundred years or more ago; since when no noteworthy changes in this respect have taken place. But it is still going on, although so slowly as to be perceptible only on close examination. All the little specks of grammar that English has are mostly to be found in the pronouns, as I have before remarked. In the use of one of these a change is very gradually taking place. _Whom_ has begun to disappear, began, indeed, a long time ago; but of late is fading somewhat more perceptibly. For example: all speakers of good English say, The man whom I saw, not The man who I saw; _whom_ being the objective form of _who_.