the idea ungrammatically; the only true form being, “Their sex need not be marked.”  See Gram.  Simplified, p. 48.  In the two places in which the etymology and the syntax of this verb are examined, I have cited from proper sources more than twenty examples in which to is used after it, and more than twenty others in which the verb is not inflected in the third person singular.  In the latter, need is treated as an auxiliary; in the former, it is a principal verb, of the regular construction.  If the principal verb need can also govern the infinitive without to, as all our grammarians have supposed, then there is a third form which is unobjectionable, and my pupils may take their choice of the three.  But still there is a fourth form which nobody approves, though the hands of some great men have furnished us with examples of it:  as, “A figure of thought need not to detort the words from their literal sense.”—­J.  Q. Adams’s Lectures, Vol. ii, p. 254.  “Which a man need only to appeal to his own feelings immediately to evince.”—­Clarkson’s Prize-Essay on Slavery, p. 106.

OBS. 15.—­Webster and Greenleaf seem inclined to justify the use of dare, as well as of need, for the third person singular.  Their doctrine is this:  “In popular practice it is used in the third person, without the personal termination.  Thus, instead of saying, ‘He dares not do it;’ WE generally say, ‘He dare not do it.’  In like manner, need, when an active verb, is regular in its inflections; as, ’A man needs more prudence.’  But when intransitive, it drops the personal terminations in the present tense, and is followed by a verb without the prefix to; as, ‘A man need not be uneasy.’”—­Greenleaf s Grammar Simplified, p. 38; Webster’s Philosophical Gram., p. 178; Improved Gram., 127.  Each part of this explanation appears to me erroneous.  In popular practice, one shall oftener hear, “He dares n’t do it,” or even, “You dares n’t do it,” than, “He dare not do it.”  But it is only in the trained practice of the schools, that he shall ever hear, “He needs n’t do it,” or, “He needs not do it.”  If need is sometimes used without inflection, this peculiarity, or the disuse of to before the subsequent infinitive, is not a necessary result of its “intransitive” character.  And as to their latent nominative, “whereof there is no account,” or, “whereof there needs no account;” their fact, of which “there is no evidence,” or of which “there needs no evidence;” I judge it a remarkable phenomenon, that authors of so high pretensions, could find, in these transpositions, a nominative to “is,” but none to “needs!” See a marginal note under Rule 14th, at p. 570.