will always be imperfect.  Consequently, a perfect system of grammatical principles, would not suit it.  A perfect grammar will not be produced, until some perfect being writes it for a perfect language; and a perfect language will not be constructed, until some super-human agency is employed in its production.  All grammatical principles and systems which are not perfect are exceptionable.”—­Kirkham’s Grammar, p. 66.  The unplausible sophistry of these strange remarks, and the palliation they afford to the multitudinous defects of the book which contains them, may be left, without further comment, to the judgement of the reader.

[65] The phrase complex ideas, or compound ideas, has been used for the notions which we have of things consisting of different parts, or having various properties, so as to embrace some sort of plurality:  thus our ideas of all bodies and classes of things are said to be complex or compound. Simple ideas are those in which the mind discovers no parts or plurality:  such are the ideas of heat, cold, blueness, redness, pleasure, pain, volition, &c.  But some writers have contended, that the composition of ideas is a fiction; and that all the complexity, in any case, consists only in the use of a general term in lieu of many particular ones.  Locke is on one side of this debate, Horne Tooke, on the other.

[66] Dilworth appears to have had a true idea of the thing, but he does not express it as a definition; “Q.  Is an Unit of one, a Number?  A. An Unit is a number, because it may properly answer the question how many!”—­Schoolmaster’s Assistant, p. 2.  A number in arithmetic, and a number in grammar, are totally different things.  The plural number, as men or horses, does not tell how many; nor does the word singular mean one, as the author of a recent grammar says it does.  The plural number is one number, but it is not the singular.  “The Productive System” teaches thus:  “What does the word singular mean?  It means one.”—­Smith’s New Gram., p. 7.

[67] It is truly astonishing that so great a majority of our grammarians could have been so blindly misled, as they have been, in this matter; and the more so, because a very good definition of a Letter was both published and republished, about the time at which Lowth’s first appeared:  viz., “What is a letter?  A Letter is the Sign, Mark, or Character of a simple or uncompounded Sound.  Are Letters Sounds?  No.  Letters are only the Signs or Symbols of Sounds, not the Sounds themselves.”—­The British Grammar, p. 3.  See the very same words on the second page of Buchanan’s “English Syntax,” a work which was published as early as 1767.

[68] In Murray’s octavo Grammar, this word is the in the first chapter, and their in the second; in the duodecimo, it is their in both places.