the phases of the moon_ and _the vogue
of a newspaper_. The drift is clearly toward the limitation, of
possessive forms to animate nouns. All the possessive pronominal forms
except _its_ and, in part, _their_ and _theirs_, are also animate. It is
significant that _theirs_ is hardly ever used in reference to inanimate
nouns, that there is some reluctance to so use _their_, and that _its_
also is beginning to give way to _of it_. _The appearance of it_ or _the
looks of it_ is more in the current of the language than _its
appearance_. It is curiously significant that _its young_ (referring to
an animal's cubs) is idiomatically preferable to _the young of it_. The
form is only ostensibly neuter, in feeling it is animate;
psychologically it belongs with _his children_, not with _the pieces of
it_. Can it be that so common a word as _its_ is actually beginning to
be difficult? Is it too doomed to disappear? It would be rash to say
that it shows signs of approaching obsolescence, but that it is steadily
weakening is fairly clear.[140] In any event, it is not too much to say
that there is a strong drift towards the restriction of the inflected
possessive forms to animate nouns and pronouns.

[Footnote 140: Should _its_ eventually drop out, it will have had a
curious history. It will have played the role of a stop-gap between
_his_ in its non-personal use (see footnote 11, page 167) and the later
analytic of _it_.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 140 refers to Footnote 132, beginning on
line 5142.]

How is it with the alternation of subjective and objective in the
pronoun? Granted that _whom_ is a weak sister, that the two cases have
been leveled in _you_ (in _it_, _that_, and _what_ they were never
distinct, so far as we can tell[141]), and that _her_ as an objective is
a trifle weak because of its formal identity with the possessive _her_,
is there any reason to doubt the vitality of such alternations as _I see
the man_ and _the man sees me_? Surely the distinction between
subjective _I_ and objective _me_, between subjective _he_ and objective
_him_, and correspondingly for other personal pronouns, belongs to the
very core of the language. We can throw _whom_ to the dogs, somehow make
shift to do without an _its_, but to level _I_ and _me_ to a single
case--would that not be to un-English our language beyond recognition?
There is no drift toward such horrors as _Me see him_ or _I see he_.
True, the phonetic disparity betwee