OBS. 2.—­Skinner, in his Canones Etymologici, calls this TO “an equivocal article,”—­Tooke, ib., i, 288.  Nutting, a late American grammarian, says:  “The sign TO is no other than the Greek article to; as, to agapan [, to love]; or, as some say, it is the Saxon do”—­Practical Gram., p. 66.  Thus, by suggesting two false and inconsistent derivations, though he uses not the name equivocal article, he first makes the word an article, and then equivocal—­equivocal in etymology, and of course in meaning.[403] Nixon, in his English Parser, supposes it to be, unequivocally, the Greek article [Greek:  to], the.  See the work, p. 83.  D. Booth says, “To is, by us, applied to Verbs; but it was the neuter Article (the) among the Greeks.”—­Introd. to Analyt.  Dict., p. 60.  According to Horne Tooke, “Minshew also distinguishes between the preposition TO, and the sign of the infinitive TO.  Of the former he is silent, and of the latter he says:  ’To, as to make, to walk, to do, a Graeco articulo [Greek:  to].’  But Dr. Gregory Sharpe is persuaded, that our language has taken it from the Hebrew.  And Vossius derives the correspondent Latin preposition AD from the same source.”—­Diversions of Purley, Vol. i, p. 293.

OBS. 3.—­Tooke also says, “I observe, that Junius and Skinner and Johnson, have not chosen to give the slightest hint concerning the derivation of TO.”—­Ibid. But, certainly, of his adverb TO, Johnson gives this hint:  “TO, Saxon; te, Dutch.”  And Webster, who calls it not an adverb, but a preposition, gives the same hint of the source from which it comes to us.  This is as much as to say, it is etymologically the old Saxon preposition to—­which, truly, it is—­the very same word that, for a thousand years or more, has been used before nouns and pronouns to govern the objective case.  Tooke himself does not deny this; but, conceiving that almost all particles, whether English or any other, can be traced back to ancient verbs or nouns, he hunts for the root of this, in a remoter region, where he pretends to find that to has the same origin as do; and though he detects the former in a Gothic noun, he scruples not to identify it with an auxiliary verb!  Yet he elsewhere expressly denies, “that any words change their nature by use, so as to belong sometimes to one part of speech, and sometimes to another.”—­Div. of Pur., Vol. i, p. 68.

OBS 4.—­From this, the fair inference is, that he will have both to and do to be “nouns substantive” still!  “Do (the auxiliary verb, as it has been called) is derived from the same root, and is indeed the same word as TO.”—­Ib., Vol. i, p. 290.  “Since FROM means commencement or beginning, TO must mean end or termination.”—­Ib.,