Excerpt from A Progressive Grammar of the English Tongue: Based on the Results of Modern Philology The present course of English Grammar, forming a part of Harper's Language-Series, is embodied in two books: 1. The "First Lessons in English;" 2. The "Progressive English Grammar." The two are not necessarily connected; either may be used by itself. The First Lessons, however, is designed to meet the wants of the lower classes of graded schools, while this text-book will connect with the First Lessons, and, at the same time, furnish by itself a complete grammatical course for ungraded and for private schools. Learning our mother tongue ought to be the most interesting of school studies; and yet, for nearly a century, countless numbers of technical grammars, all modeled after Lindley Murray, have been, by turns, the object of aversion to successive generations of school children. This is not to be wondered at. The traditional rules of syntax, and the time-honored nomenclature of etymology, have come down to us a heritage from the elder grammarians, who, writing before philology became a science, put forth all their strength in a too successful endeavor to subject our simple and peculiar English speech to the vassalage of Latin forms. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.