Gram., p. 194.[421] This very popular author seems never to have known that participles, as such, may be governed in English by prepositions.  And yet he knew, and said, that “prepositions do not, like articles and pronouns, convert the participle itself into the nature of a substantive.”—­Ibid. This he avouches in the same breath in which he gives that “nature” to a participle and its adverb!  For, by a false comma after much, he cuts his first “substantive phrase” absurdly in two; and doubtless supposes a false ellipsis of by before the participle performing.  Of his method of resolving the second example, some notice has already been taken, in Observations 4th and 5th on Rule 5th.  Though he pretends that the whole phrase is in the objective case, “the truth is, the assertion grammatically affects the first word only;” which in one aspect he regards as a noun, and in an other as a participle:  whereas he himself, on the preceding page, had adopted from Lowth a different doctrine, and cautioned the learner against treating words in ing, “as if they were of an amphibious species, partly nouns and partly verbs;” that is, “partly nouns and partly participles;” for, according to Murray, Lowth, and many others, participles are verbs.  The term, “substantive phrase,” itself a solecism, was invented merely to cloak this otherwise bald inconsistency.  Copying Lowth again, the great Compiler defines a phrase to be “two or more words rightly put together;” and, surely, if we have a well-digested system of grammar, whatsoever words are rightly put together, may be regularly parsed by it.  But how can one indivisible word be consistently made two different parts of speech at once?  And is not this the situation of every transitive participle that is made either the subject or the object of a verb?  Adjuncts never alter either the nature or the construction of the words on which they depend; and participial nouns differ from participles in both.  The former express actions as things; the latter generally attribute them to their agents or recipients.

OBS. 21.—­The Latin gerund is “a kind of verbal noun, partaking of the nature of a participle.”—­Webster’s Dict. “A gerund is a participial noun, of the neuter gender, and singular-number, declinable like a substantive, having no vocative, construed like a substantive, and governing the case of its verb.”—­Grant’s Lat.  Gram., p. 70.  In the Latin gerund thus defined, there is an appearance of ancient classical authority for that “amphibious species” of words of which so much notice has already been taken.  Our participle in ing, when governed by a preposition, undoubtedly corresponds very nearly, both in sense and construction, to this Latin gerund; the principal difference being, that the one is declined, like a noun, and the other is not.  The analogy, however, is but lamely maintained, when we come to those irregular