.--G. B.

[128] This book has, probably, more _recommenders_ than any other of the
sort. I have not patience to count them accurately, but it would seem that
_more than a thousand_ of the great and learned have certified to the
world, that they never before had seen so good a spelling-book! With
personal knowledge of more than fifty of the signers, G. B. refused to add
his poor name, being ashamed of the mischievous facility with which very
respectable men had loaned their signatures.

[129] _Scrat_, for _scratch._ The word is now obsolete, and may be altered
by taking _ch_ in the correction.

[130] "_Hairbrained, adj._ This should rather be written _harebrained_;
unconstant, unsettled, wild as a _hare._"--_Johnson's Dict._ Webster writes
it _harebrained_, as from _hare_ and _brain_. Worcester, too, prefers this
form.

[131] "The whole number of verbs in the English language, regular and
irregular, simple and compounded, taken together, is about 4,300. See, in
Dr. Ward's Essays on the English language, the catalogue of English verbs.
The whole number of irregular verbs, the defective included, is about
176."--_Lowth's Gram._, Philad., 1799, p. 59. Lindley Murray copied the
first and the last of these three sentences, but made the latter number
"about 177."--_Octavo Gram._, p. 109; _Duodecimo_, p. 88. In the latter
work, he has this note: "The whole number of _words_, in the English
language, is about thirty-five thousand."--_Ib._ Churchill says, "The whole
number of verbs in the English language, according to Dr. Ward, is about
4,300. The irregulars, including the auxilaries [sic--KTH], scarcely exceed
200."--_New Gram._, p. 113. An other late author has the following
enumeration: "There are in the English language about twenty thousand five
hundred nouns, forty pronouns, _eight thousand verbs_, nine thousand two
hundred adnouns, two thousand six hundred adverbs, sixty-nine prepositions,
nineteen conjunctions, and sixty-eight interjections; in all, above forty
thousand words."--_Rev. David Blair's Gram._, p. 10. William Ward, M. A.,
in an old grammar _undated_, which speaks of Dr. Lowth's as one with which
the public had "_very lately_ been favoured," says: "There are _four
Thousand and about Five Hundred Verbs_ in the English [language]."--_Ward's
Practical Gram._, p. 52.

[132] These definitions are numbered here, because each of them is the
first of a series now begun. In class rehearsals, the pupils may be
requ