Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. Reason is the distinguishing excellence of man, and language the means by which its operations are performed. How important must be the instrument on which so many millions depend, in all the transactions, and all the social enjoyments of life. The design, in what is here advanced, is to explain those simple principles by which the mind is guided in the use of language, with such rules of practice as are important to the English scholar. The learning, talents, and means of research, possessed by many who have spent the labor of their lives in the same field, are not to be depreciated nor denied. It would ill become the author of this treatise to pretend to equal competition with such writers; or, in contemplating their important and difficult undertaking, to withhold the tribute justly due to their characters. On the other hand, no disguise will be assumed. The system here in its outline proposed, will be found essentially to differ from any theory of language hitherto received. Under these circumstances, some excuse may seem indispensable, for offering such a work. Without pretension to high attainments, it has been the author's fortune to become slightly acquainted with some branches of knowledge, the principles of which, he considered valuable, in their application to the structure of speech. The reasons which led him to change his opinions, and yield the prejudices of instruction and habit, may possibly have some effect on the minds of others. The contradictory, deficient and inapplicable directions, observable in the most popular works on grammar, are different from any thing to which we are accustomed, at the present day, in other scientific pursuits. These were very perplexing, in practice, to the author, as they doubtless are to others who ...