_That_ has no longer any standing place in the relative ranks; it merely relieves _which_ of a part of its work; and in English writers even this supernumerary function has practically ceased to be filled by it. A second condition of the use of relatives is much more important. It has always been possible to build the best of English sentences without relatives. A peculiarly animated sentence of any age will usually contain no relatives. In Dr. John Hall’s sermon, the longest sentences and the animated passages contain no relatives. When he drops into a relative, we see that the exaltation of feeling is passing off, and the sermon is sinking to a lower level of interest. It is apparently a law, then, that relatives are more rarely found in animated, elevated and perfectly clear English than in weaker and less emotional writing. A third fact is that I find the relatives of a sermon, book, or essay, occurring in groups. Often there are whole pages with none; then come three, four, five or more in about as many lines. This grouping is almost as true of the Bible as of modern English. In Dr. Hall’s sermon, fifty-six occur in the first and least animated half of it, and only thirty-eight in the second half of it, and one fifth of all the relatives of the discourse occur in groups; take twenty-four printed lines out of the sermon, and there will be left only about as many as Professor Jevons employs. The effect of these groups deserves, I have thought, careful study; but the results require more space than is now at command. A single example from Mr. Froude will suffice to indicate the general conclusion. Within thirty-six lines—taken in groups of from two to fourteen lines—Mr. Froude uses twenty-five relatives—or one relative in each fourteen words, while his general average is—as above stated—one in each one hundred and twenty words. How shall we describe such a use of relatives? Plainly they are not necessary. The only explanation I can think of is that it is a careless habit. The relatived passages are the poorest and weakest, in all the modern English I have examined. The groups of relatives are to me very significant; they show that relative pronouns are unnecessary; the ineffectiveness of the English where they occur shows that the relative is obsolescent.