processes of thought and long involved sentences of speech are unknown?  Consequently, the contrivances for stringing together dependent clauses don’t exist.  Then some wiseacre of an 18th or 19th century German writes a grammar on the assumption that a paulo-post-futurum is necessarily to be provided for the unfortunate Israelite who thought and talked child’s language.  Now, we Melanesians habitually think and speak such languages.  I assure you the Hebrew narrative viewed from the Melanesian point of thought is wonderfully graphic and lifelike.  The English version is dull and lifeless in comparison.  No modern Hebrew scholar agrees with any other as to the mode of construing Hebrew.  Anyone makes anything out of those unfortunately misused tenses.  Delitzsch, Ewald, Gesenius, Perowne, Thrupp, Kay too, give no rule by which the scholar is to know from the grammar whether the time is past, present, or future, i.e., whether such and such a verse is a narrative of a past fact or the prophecy of a future one.  It is much a matter of exegesis; but exegesis not based on grammar is worth very little.

’Really the time is not inherent in the tense at all.  But that is a strong assertion, which I think I could prove, give me time and a power of writing clearly.  Sir William Martin is trying to prove it.

’All languages of the South Seas are constructed on the same principle.  We say, “When I get there, it will be right.”  But all South Sea Islanders, “I am there, and it is right.”  The time is given by something in the context which indicates that the speaker’s mind is in past, present, or future time.  “In the beginning God made” rightly, so, but not because the tense gives the past sense, for the same tense very often can’t have anything to do with a past sense, but in the beginning indicates a past time.

’The doctrine of the Vaw conversive is simply a figment of so-called grammarians; language is not an artificial product, but a natural mode of expressing ideas.

’And if they assume that Hebrew has a perfect and imperfect, or past and future (for the grammars use all kinds of names), why on earth should people who have, on their showing, a past tense, use a clumsy contrivance of turning a future tense into a past, and vice versa?

’If people had remembered that language is not a trick invented and contrived by scholars at their desks, but a natural gift, simple at first, and elaborated by degrees, they could not have made such a mess.

’The truth is, I think, that such a contrivance was devised to make Hebrew do what European scholars decided it must do, these very men being ignorant of languages in a simple uncivilised form.

’But, my dear Uncle, what a prose!  Only, as I think a good deal about it, you will excuse it, I know.

’Well, it is time for the weddings!  The Chapel looks so pretty, and (you can’t believe it) so do the girls, Emma, Eliza, and Minnie, to be married to Edwin, Mulewasawasa, Thomas.  The native name is a baptismal one, nevertheless, and a good fellow he is, my head nurse in my illness.