d industry deserve. I think myself
greatly obliged to him for the very obliging notice he has
been pleased to take of me, and should be glad to contribute
anything in my power to compleating his design. I approve
greatly of his plan for a Rational Grammar, and am convinced
that a work of this kind, executed with his abilities and
industry, may prove not only the best system of grammar, but
the best system of logic in any language, as well as the
best history of the natural progress of the human mind in
forming the most important abstractions upon which all
reasoning depends. From the short abstract which Mr. Ward
has been so good as to send me, it is impossible for me to
form any very decisive judgment concerning the propriety of
every part of his method, particularly of some of his
divisions. If I was to treat the same subject, I should
endeavour to begin with the consideration of verbs; these
being in my apprehension the original parts of speech, first
invented to express in one word a compleat event; I should
then have endeavoured to show how the subject was divided to
form the attribute, and afterwards how the object was
distinguished from both; and in this manner I should have
tried to investigate the origin and use of all the different
parts of speech and of all their different modifications,
considered as necessary to express the different
qualifications and relations of any single event. Mr. Ward,
however, may have excellent reasons for following his own
method; and perhaps if I was engaged in the same task I
should find it necessary to follow the same; things
frequently appearing in a very different light when taken in
a general view, which is the only view I can pretend to have
taken of them, and when considered in detail.

Mr. Ward, when he mentions the definitions which different
authors have given of nouns substantive, takes no notice of
that of the Abbe Girard, the author of the book called _Les
Vrais Principes de la Langue Francoise_, which made me think
it might be possible that he had not seen it. It is the book
which first set me a thinking upon these subjects, and I
have received more instruction from it than from any other I
have yet seen upon them. If Mr. Ward has not seen it, I have
it at his service. Th