inasmuch as it is clearly nothing but another part of speech, the pronoun, _that_, with a third part of speech, the noun, _thing_, understood. This is getting at a solution of words into their component parts, not glossing over one difficulty by bringing another to parallel it, nor like saying with Mr. Harris, when it is asked, ‘what a Conjunction is?’ that there are conjunctions copulative, conjunctions disjunctive, and as many other frivolous varieties of the species as any one chooses to hunt out ‘with laborious foolery.’ Our author hit upon his parent-discovery in the course of a lawsuit, while he was examining, with jealous watchfulness, the meaning of words to prevent being entrapped by them; or rather, this circumstance might itself be traced to the habit of satisfying his own mind as to the precise sense in which he himself made use of words. Mr. Tooke, though he had no objection to puzzle others, was mightily averse to being puzzled or _mystified_ himself. All was, to his determined mind, either complete light or complete darkness. There was no hazy, doubtful _chiaro-scuro_ in his understanding. He wanted something ‘palpable to feeling as to sight.’ ‘What,’ he would say to himself, ‘do I mean when I use the conjunction _that_? Is it an anomaly, a class by itself, a word sealed against all inquisitive attempts? Is it enough to call it a _copula_, a bridge, a link, a word connecting sentences? That is undoubtedly its use, but what is its origin?’ Mr. Tooke thought he had answered this question satisfactorily, and loosened the Gordian knot of grammarians, ‘familiar as his garter,’ when he said, ‘It is the common pronoun, adjective, or participle, _that_, with the noun, _thing or proposition_, implied, and the particular example following it.’ So he thought, and so every reader has thought since, with the exception of teachers and writers upon Grammar. Mr. Windham, indeed, who was a sophist, but not a logician, charged him with having found ‘a mare’s-nest’; but it is not to be doubted that Mr. Tooke’s etymologies will stand the test, and last longer than Mr. Windham’s ingenious derivation of the practice of bull-baiting from the principles of humanity!