thoughts ill conceived, and not well expressed—­he could not do better than take the foregoing:  provided his auditors knew enough of grammar to answer the four simple questions here involved; namely, What is the positive degree?  What is the comparative degree?  What is the superlative degree?  How are adjectives regularly compared?  To these questions I shall furnish direct answers, which the reader may compare with such as he can derive from the foregoing citation:  the last two sentences of which Murray ought to have credited to Dr. Lowth; for he copied them literally, except that he says, “the adverbs more AND most,” for the Doctor’s phrase, “the adverbs more OR most.”  See the whole also in Kirkham’s Grammar, p. 72; in Ingersoll’s, p. 35; in Alger’s, p. 21; in Bacon’s, p. 18; in Russell’s, p. 14; in Hamlin’s, p. 22; in J.  M. Putnam’s, p. 33; in S.  Putnam’s, p. 20; in R.  C. Smith’s, p. 51; in Rev. T. Smith’s, p. 20.

OBS. 4.—­In the five short sentences quoted above, there are more errors, than can possibly be enumerated in ten times the space.  For example:  (1.) If one should say of a piece of iron, “It grows cold or hot very rapidly,” cold and hot could not be in the “positive state,” as they define it:  because, either the “quality” or the “object,” (I know not which,) is represented by them as “without any increase or diminution;” and this would not, in the present case, be true of either; for iron changes in bulk, by a change of temperature. (2.) What, in the first sentence, is erroneously called “the positive state,” in the second and the third, is called, “the positive degree;” and this again, in the fourth, is falsely identified with “the simple word.”  Now, if we suppose the meaning to be, that “the positive state,” “the positive degree,” or “the simple word,” is “without any increase or diminution;” this is expressly contradicted by three sentences out of the five, and implicitly, by one of the others. (3.) Not one of these sentences is true, in the most obvious sense of the words, if in any other; and yet the doctrines they were designed to teach, may have been, in general, correctly gathered from the examples. (4.) The phrase, “positive in signification,” is not intelligible in the sense intended, without a comma after positive; and yet, in an armful of different English grammars which contain the passage, I find not one that has a point in that place. (5.) It is not more correct to say, that the comparative or the superlative degree, “increases or lessens the positive,” than it would be to aver, that the plural number increases or lessens the singular, or the feminine gender, the masculine.  Nor does the superlative mean, what a certain learned Doctor understands by it—­namely, “the greatest or least possible degree.”  If it did, “the thickest parts of his