ensures its backward repetition. The practical applicability of '_As in praesenti_' is therefore solely to the act of _writing_ Latin: for, having occasion to translate the words 'I touched' I search for the Latin equivalent to the English word _touch_--find that it is _tango_, and then am reminded (whilst forming the preterite) that _tango_ makes not _tanxi_ but '_tetigi_.' Such a use therefore I might by possibility derive from my long labours: meantime even here the service is in all probability doubly superfluous: for, by the time that I am called on to write Latin at all, experience will have taught me that _tango_ makes _tetigi_; or, supposing that I am required to write Latin as one of the earliest means for gaining experience, even in that case the very same dictionary which teaches me what is Latin for '_touch_' teaches me what is the irregular preterite and supine of _tango_. And thus the 'upshot' (to use a homely word) of the whole business--is that an effort of memory, so great as to be capable otherwise directed of mastering a science, and secondly (because directed to an unnatural composition, viz. an arrangement of metre, which is at once the rudest and the most elaborately artificial), so disgusting as that no accession of knowledge could compensate the injury thus done to the simplicity of the child's understanding, by connecting pain and a sense of unintelligible mystery with his earliest steps in knowledge,--all this hyperbolical apparatus and machinery is worked for no one end or purpose that is not better answered by a question to his tutor, by consulting his dictionary, or by the _insensible_ progress of daily experience. Even this argument derived from its utter uselessness does not however weigh so much with us as the other argument derived from the want of common-sense, involved in the wilful forestalling and artificial concentrating into one long rosary of anomalies, what else the nature of the case has by good luck dispersed over the whole territory of the Latin language. To be consistent, a tutor should take the same proleptical course with regard to the prosody of the Latin language: every Latin hyperdissyllable is manifestly accentuated according to the following law: if the penultimate be long, that syllable inevitably claims the accent; if short, inevitably it rejects it--_i. e._ gives it to the ante-penultimate. The determining syllable is therefore the penultimate; and for the due reading of Latin the sole question is about the quantity of the penultimate. According to the logic therefore which could ever have introduced '_As in praesenti_,' the tutor ought to make his pupils commit to memory every individual word in which the quantity was not predetermined by a mechanical rule--(as it is _e. g._ in the gen. plural _[=o]rum_, of the second declension, the _[=e]runt_ of the third per. plurals of the preterite, &c., or the cases where the vowel is long by position). But what man of sense