2.  When the possessive is affirmed or denied; as, “The book is mine, and not John’s.”  But here the governing noun may be supplied in its proper place; and, in some such instances, it must be, else a pronoun or the verb will be the only governing word:  as, “Ye are Christ’s [disciples, or people]; and Christ is God’s” [son].—­St. Paul.  Whether this phraseology is thus elliptical or not, is questionable.  See Obs. 4th, in this series.

3.  When the case occurs without the sign, either by apposition or by connexion; as, “In her brother Absalom’s house.”—­Bible. “David and Jonathan’s friendship.”—­Allen. “Adam and Eve’s morning hymn.”—­Dr. Ash.  “Behold the heaven, and the heaven of heavens, is the Lord’s thy God.”—­Deut.,, x, 14.  “For peace and quiet’s sake.”—­Cowper.  “To the beginning of King James the First’s reign.”—­Bolingbroke, on Hist., p. 32.

OBS. 21—­The possessive case is in general (though not always) equivalent to the preposition of and the objective; as, “Of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son.”—­John, xiii, 2. “To Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon.”—­Ib., xiii, 26.  On account of this one-sided equivalence, many grammarians erroneously reckon the latter to be a “genitive case” as well as the former.  But they ought to remember, that the preposition is used more frequently than the possessive, and in a variety of senses that cannot be interpreted by this case; as, “Of some of the books of each of these classes of literature, a catalogue will be given at the end of the work.”—­L.  Murray’s Gram., p. 178.  Murray calls this a “laborious mode of expression,” and doubtless it might be a little improved by substituting in for the third of; but my argument is, that the meaning conveyed cannot be expressed by possessives.  The notion that of forms a genitive case, led Priestley to suggest, that our language admits a “double genitive;” as, “This book of my friend’s.”—­Priestley’s Gram., p. 71.  “It is a discovery of Sir Isaac Newton’s.”—­Ib., p. 72.  “This exactness of his.”—­STERNE:  ib. The doctrine has since passed into nearly all our grammars; yet is there no double case here, as I shall presently show.

OBS. 22.—­Where the governing noun cannot be easily mistaken, it is often omitted by ellipsis:  as, “At the alderman’s” [house];—­“St. Paul’s” [church];—­“A book of my brother’s” [books];—­“A subject of the emperor’s” [subjects];—­“A friend of mine;” i. e., one of my friends.  “Shall we say that Sacrificing was a pure invention of Adam’s, or of Cain or Abel’s?”—­Leslie, on Tythes, p. 93.  That is—­of Adam’s