As Mr. Sweet says: “If we define inflection as ‘agglutination run mad’ we may regard incorporation as inflection run madder still, for it is the result of attempting to develop a verb into a complete sentence.” In some languages, such as the incorporating, a verb is sufficiently distinct in its meaning not to require an independent pronoun. French and Spanish, though not belonging to this category, contain words with the incorporating idea, as in Spanish _hablo_, I speak, and French, _pluit_, it rains. Where polysynthesism is the prevailing character, the verb may be sufficiently comprehensive to include the objective pronoun as well as the subjective, so that it is possible to find in one word a transitive, as well as in others an intransitive, sentence. But this is only rudimentary incorporation, and borders on inflection. Some American Indian languages carry it to a very high degree, appending to or inserting into this simple complex not only nouns which may stand in apposition to the implied or actual pronouns, but particles and modifiers of every description. (See the _Handbook of American Indian Languages_, published by the Bureau of American Ethnology at Washington.) Frequently during this process various parts undergo phonetic changes in accordance with fixed laws, so that the final complex may not at all resemble a string of the original elements, but becomes a new, inseparable and fixed word containing a whole sentence of ideas. This sentence, in some languages, may carry throughout certain modifiers for all noun elements—for instance, as to whether the objects under discussion are visible or invisible. These modifiers bear definite relationships to the nouns, and the “sentence word” in each of its parts must then be conjugated as a verb in an even more complicated manner. This is agglutination par excellence, and is frequently so complex as to be utterly bewildering to the Indo-European mind, even though the Indo-European languages themselves employ agglutination to a limited degree and of certain varieties, particularly of the inflectional order. Compared to the most complicated Indian tongues, English is in the position of Chinese to Indo-European languages in its structural simplicity, though of course in Chinese we have an added complexity in the use of pitch, etc. There are certain types of speech which secure changes (plurals, etc.) by internal vowel modification. English itself makes use of this device, but it is the outstanding feature of Semitic tongues.