days.”—­N.  Y. Daily Advertiser.  “About one hundred feet of the Muncy dam has been swept off.”—­N.  Y. Observer.  “Upwards of one hundred thousand dollars have been appropriated.”—­Newspaper.  “But I fear there are between twenty and thirty of them.”—­Tooke’s Diversions, ii, 441.  “Besides which, there are upwards of fifty smaller islands.”—­Balbi’s Geog., p. 30.  “On board of which embarked upwards of three hundred passengers.”—­Robertson’s Amer., ii, 419.  The propriety of using above or upwards of for more than, is questionable, but the practice is not uncommon.  When there is a preposition before what seems at first to be the subject of the verb, as in the foregoing instances, I imagine there is an ellipsis of the word number, amount, sum or quantity; the first of which words is a collective noun and may have a verb either singular or plural:  as, “In a sermon, there may be any number from three to five or six heads.”  This is awkward, to be sure; but what does the Doctor’s sentence mean, unless it is, that there may be an optional number of heads, varying from three to six?

OBS. 13.—­Dr. Webster says, “When an aggregate amount is expressed by the plural names of the particulars composing that amount, the verb may be in the singular number; as, ’There was more than a hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling.’ Mavor’s Voyages.”  To this he adds, “However repugnant to the principles of grammar this may seem at first view, the practice is correct; for the affirmation is not made of the individual parts or divisions named, the pounds, but of the entire sum or amount.”—­Philosophical Gram., p. 146; Improved Gram., p. 100.  The fact is, that the Doctor here, as in some other instances, deduces a false rule from a correct usage.  It is plain that either the word more, taken substantively, or the noun to which it relates as an adjective, is the only nominative to the verb was.  Mavor does not affirm that there were a hundred and fitly thousand pounds; but that there was more—­i.e., more money than so many pounds are, or amount to.  Oliver B. Peirce, too. falls into a multitude of strange errors respecting the nature of more than, and the construction of other words that accompany these.  See his “Analytical Rules,” and the manner in which he applies them, in “The Grammar,” p. 195 et seq.

OBS. 14.—­Among certain educationists,—­grammarians, arithmeticians, schoolmasters, and others,—­there has been of late not a little dispute concerning the syntax of the phraseology which we use, or should use, in expressing multiplication, or in speaking of abstract numbers.  For example:  is it better to say, “Twice one is two,” or, “Twice one are two?”—­“Two times one is two,” or, “Two times