OBS. 4.—­What is the office of this part of speech, according to Lennie, Bullions, Brace, Hart, Hiley, Smith, M’Culloch, Webster, Wells, and others, who say that it “joins words and sentences together,” (see Errors on p. 434 of this work,) it is scarcely possible to conceive.  If they imagine it to connect “words” on the one side, to “sentences” on the other; this is plainly absurd, and contrary to facts.  If they suppose it to join sentence to sentence, by merely connecting word to word, in a joint relation; this also is absurd, and self-contradictory.  Again, if they mean, that the conjunction sometimes connects word with word, and sometimes, sentence with sentence; this sense they have not expressed, but have severally puzzled their readers by an ungrammatical use of the word “and.”  One of the best among them says, “In the sentence, ’He and I must go,’ the word and unites two sentences, and thus avoids an unnecessary repetition; thus instead of saying, ‘He must go,’ ‘I must go,’ we connect the words He, I, as the same thing is affirmed of both, namely, must go.”—­Hiley’s Gram., p. 53.  Here is the incongruous suggestion, that by connecting words only, the conjunction in fact connects sentences; and the stranger blunder concerning those words, that “the same thing is affirmed of both, namely, [that they] must go.”  Whereas it is plain, that nothing is affirmed of either:  for “He and I must go,” only affirms of him and me, that “we must go.”  And again it is plain, that and here connects nothing but the two pronouns; for no one will say, that, “He and I must go together” is a compound sentence, capable of being resolved into two simple sentences; and if, “He and I must go,” is compound because it is equivalent to, “He must go, and I must go;” so is, “We must go,” for the same reason, though it has but one nominative and one verb. “He and I were present,” is rightly given by Hiley as an example of two pronouns connected together by and. (See his Gram., p. 105.) But, of verbs connected to each other, he absurdly supposes the following to be examples:  “He spake, and it was done.”—­“I know it, and I can prove it.”—­“Do you say so, and can you prove it?”—­Ib. Here and connects sentences, and not particular words.

OBS. 5.—­Two or three conjunctions sometimes come together; as, “What rests, but that the mortal sentence pass?”—­Milton. “Nor yet that he should offer himself often.”—­Heb., ix, 25.  These may be severally parsed as “connecting what precedes and what follows,” and the observant reader will not fail to notice, that such combinations of connecting particles are sometimes required by the sense; but, since nothing that is needless, is