It would be a mistake to suppose that the analogies of language are always
uniform: there may be often a choice between several, and sometimes one
and sometimes another will prevail. In Greek there are three declensions
of nouns; the forms of cases in one of them may intrude upon another.
Similarly verbs in -omega and -mu iota interchange forms of tenses, and the
completed paradigm of the verb is often made up of both. The same nouns
may be partly declinable and partly indeclinable, and in some of their
cases may have fallen out of use. Here are rules with exceptions; they are
not however really exceptions, but contain in themselves indications of
other rules. Many of these interruptions or variations of analogy occur in
pronouns or in the verb of existence of which the forms were too common and
therefore too deeply imbedded in language entirely to drop out. The same
verbs in the same meaning may sometimes take one case, sometimes another.
The participle may also have the character of an adjective, the adverb
either of an adjective or of a preposition. These exceptions are as
regular as the rules, but the causes of them are seldom known to us.

Language, like the animal and vegetable worlds, is everywhere intersected
by the lines of analogy. Like number from which it seems to be derived,
the principle of analogy opens the eyes of men to discern the similarities
and differences of things, and their relations to one another. At first
these are such as lie on the surface only; after a time they are seen by
men to reach farther down into the nature of things. Gradually in language
they arrange themselves into a sort of imperfect system; groups of personal
and case endings are placed side by side. The fertility of language
produces many more than are wanted; and the superfluous ones are utilized
by the assignment to them of new meanings. The vacuity and the superfluity
are thus partially compensated by each other. It must be remembered that
in all the languages which have a literature, certainly in Sanskrit, Greek,
Latin, we are not at the beginning but almost at the end of the linguistic