Let us further illustrate this point by a brief consideration of a subject which is very perplexing to the learners of a foreign language, and which is not less so to the historical students of language in general; a subject which, I believe, has never been explained by the latter with any semblance of satisfaction—gender. All other languages are infested with gender; in English there is no such distinction in words as that of gender. English, it should be needless to say, has words to express difference of sex; that no language can fail to do, for failing in that, it would not communicate the facts and thoughts of every-day life. But grammatical gender has no relation to sex, no relation to the essential characteristics of things. Gender, grammatical gender, is an attribute of _words_. He creatures are male, she creatures female, and the words which are their names are generally (but not universally) masculine and feminine in all languages. Things neither male nor female are neuter, which means merely, neither. But this is not gender. Gender, as I have said before, is an attribute of words; of words only. For example, the Latin word _penna_—a pen, or quill, is feminine; in French the word _table_—table, is also feminine. It is needless to say that there is no question as to the sex of a pen, or of a table; nor is there any quality in either of those objects which has a sexual trait or characteristic. In each case it is the word which is of the feminine gender; and in all, or almost all, languages but English all or almost all words are afflicted with this mysterious pest of gender. How annoying and perplexing it is, and how it complicates the use of language, and makes the acquisition of foreign languages difficult, no student needs be told. For it creates an ever present and far-reaching perplexity. It dominates the construction of the sentence and binds it up in bonds of iron. For every adjective, and in French and other languages having articles, every article which is applied to a noun must be of the gender of that noun. You can not say in Latin _bonus penna_, a good pen, without “bad grammar,” you must say _bona penna_. You can not say in French _un mauvais table_, a bad table, but must say _une mauvaise table_; nor _le table_, but _la table_—although both mean the table, nothing more nor less. The absurdity of this is made very apparent when a feminine word is applied to a male object. Thus _majesté_—majesty, is feminine; but when a king is called your majesty, the words _sa majesté_ (her majesty) are used because the _word majesty_ is feminine; and instead of saying he (_il_) did thus or so, we must say she (_elle_) did it, although the she was a man; the reason being that the word _majesté_ is feminine.[1] All this has been swept clean away in English, in which language there is no distinction of gender but only that of sex: male creatures, or those so personified, are masculine, female, feminine; those which have