Compared with these two powers all the others are inconsiderable, both in number and importance; and if, as in the Greek and Latin languages, they take up a large space in the grammars, it is from their exceptional character rather than from their normal genitival signification. Again, if both the ideas of possession and partition may, and in many cases must be, reduced to the more general idea of relation, this is a point of grammatical phraseology by no means affecting the practical and special bearings of the present division. s. 449. _The adjectival expression of the idea of possession._--All the world over, a property is a possession; and _persons_, at least, may be said to be the owners of their attributes. Whatever may be the nature of words like _mine_ and _thine_, the adjectival character of their Latin equivalents, _meus_ and _tuus_, is undoubted. _The ideas of partition and possession merge into one another._--_A man's spade is the_ possession _of a man; a man's hand is the_ part _of a man._ Nevertheless, when a man uses his hand as the instrument of his will, the idea which arises from the fact of its being _part_ of his body is merged in the idea of the possessorship which arises from the feeling of ownership or mastery which is evinced in its subservience and application. Without following the refinements to which the further investigation of these questions would lead us, it is sufficient to suggest that the preponderance of the two allied ideas of partition and possession is often determined by the {383} personality or the non-personality of the subject, and that, when the subject is a person, the idea is chiefly possessive; when a thing, partitive--_caput fluvii_=_the head, which is a part, of a river_; _caput Toli_=_the head, which is the possession, of Tolus_. But as persons may be degraded to the rank of things, and as things may, by personification, be elevated to the level of persons, this distinction, although real, may become apparently invalid. In phrases like a _tributary to the Tiber_--_the criminal lost his eye_--_this field belongs to that parish_--the ideas of possessorship and partition, as allied ideas subordinate to the idea of relationship in general, verify the interchange. s. 450. These observations should bring us to the fact that there are two ideas which, more than any other, determine the evolution of a genitive case--the idea of partition and the idea of possession; _and that genitive cases are likely to be evolved just in proportion as there is a necessity for the expression of these two ideas_.--Let this be applied to the question of the [`a] priori probability of the evolution of a genitive case to the pronouns of the first and second persons of the singular number.