OBS. 8.—­An ill scheme of parsing, or an ill use of a good one, is almost as unlucky in grammar, as an ill method of ciphering, or an ill use of a good one, would be in arithmetic.  From the strong contrast cited above, one might suspect that, in selecting, devising, or using, a technical process for the exercising of learners in the principles of etymology and syntax, this author had been less fortunate than the generality of his fellows.  Not only is it implied, that parsing is no critical analysis, but even what is set in opposition to the “mechanical routine,” may very well serve for a definition of Syntactical Parsing—­“the practice of explaining the various relations and offices of words in a sentence!” If this “practice,” well ordered, can be at once interesting and profitable to the learner, so may parsing.  Nor, after all, is even this author’s mode of parsing, defective though it is in several respects, less “important” to the users of his book, or less valued by teachers, than the analysis which he sets above it.

OBS. 9.—­S.  S. Greene, a public teacher in Boston, who, in answer to a supposed “demand for a more philosophical plan of teaching the English language,” has entered in earnest upon the “Analysis of Sentences,” having devoted to one method of it more than the space of two hundred duodecimo pages, speaks of analysis and of parsing, thus:  “The resolving of a sentence into its elements, or of any complex element into the parts which compose it, is called analysis.”—­Greene’s Analysis, p. 14.  “Parsing consists in naming a part of speech, giving its modifications, relation, agreement or dependence, and the rule for its construction. Analysis consists in pointing out the words or groups of words which constitute the elements of a sentence.  Analysis should precede parsing.”—­Ib., p. 26.  “A large proportion of the elements of sentences are not single words, but combinations or groups of words.  These groups perform the office of the substantive, the adjective, or the adverb, and, in some one of these relations, enter in as the component parts of a sentence.  The pupil who learns to determine the elements of a sentence, must, therefore, learn the force of these combinations before he separates them into the single words which compose them. This advantage is wholly lost in the ordinary methods of parsing.”—­Ib., p. 3.

OBS. 10.—­On these passages, it may be remarked in the first place, that the distinction attempted between analysis and parsing is by no means clear, or well drawn.  Nor indeed could it be; because parsing is a species of analysis.  The first assertion would be just as true as it is now, were the former word substituted for the latter:  thus, “The resolving of a sentence into its elements, or of any complex element into the parts which compose it, is called parsing.”  Next, the