sources of natural organization, physiological utterance, and mental development. While Gesenius and Stuart have determined on the former course, Ewald and Bush have decided for the latter. We henceforth go back to the first principles of things. We have the laws of mind and the phenomena of language both before us; and it is hard if we cannot, having the causes and effects thus placed in juxta-position, the extremes, as it were, of the proportion, discover the means by which a harmonious system may be realized.

Yet it is a matter of uniform experience, that, in the promulgation of any new theory, there is a tendency in the human mind to rush to extravagance. Though each party may possess a portion of the truth, yet an innovator does not think his work of regeneration perfect till he has torn up the old system, root and branch: he comes forth with no conservative reform: his object is to destroy, not to save. Thus the method of Gesenius has been beaten up in all its fastnesses and strongholds merely to gratify the revolutionary spleen of a new dictator; and consequently other grammarians must step in to mediate between the contending parties, and reconcile the discordant theories by an harmonious adjustment. It is needless to say, that, while Professor Bush has given a judicious prominence to Ewald's system, he has not altogether abandoned the principles of his old master. He has extracted every thing that was sound and useful, and grafted it upon the old stock; he has caught the spirit of Ewald, who was rather too prolix, exuberant, arbitrary, vague, and unpractical, and reduced him to a more symmetrical and compact form; he has introduced his philosophy to give life to the barren frame-work of Gesenius and Stuart, and to throw interest into their dry mannerisms. Where we have hitherto been contented to take the facts of the Hebrew phenomena of language, we are now made acquainted with their natural history; and thus Hebrew, no longer an isolated, abstruse study, becomes a branch of a widely extended cyclopædia of knowledge, in which the physiology of language and thought is traced to its first elements, and is made to become an important and necessary part of a sound and liberal education.

We are not to look upon Professor Bush as a hewer of wood or a drawer of water. His position is that of a master workman. It is not his office to make the wheels of the machinery, or even to set them in motion, in any particular system. He looks abroad from above all systems, and moderates the errors of their orbits where they would seem to threaten a general collision and universal ruin. Yet Professor Bush can pick up a pin with the same facility as he can tear up the trunk of a tree. His whole soul is occasion

ally in philology, and eager for the fray. His comprehensive mind can thread the whole minutiae of detail into a general plan, without abandoning one straw to the wind as a useless incumbrance; and thus, while the elements of the language are thrown out into a bold, lucid, orderly circle of arrangement, and the minor details condensed into a wheel within a wheel by the aid of typographical contrast, one philosophical spirit animates the mass; and the student, becoming interested, is carried along without being aware of the secret influence which impels him.

Yet Professor Bush has apparently a competitor in the race.

Professor Stuart is, what may be called, passé. But Professor Nordheimer, of the same university, has come forward with an incomplete Critical Grammar of the Hebrew Language. He subscribes himself the acting professor of New-York University, and is posterior in standing there to Professor Bush. The latter, perhaps, has been, like the knight Fainéant, of Ivanhoe, the genuine Cœur de Lion, reserving himself for great occasions. The Critical Grammar of Nordheimer, as far as published, viz., the whole of the orthoepy, orthography, and etymology, preceded that of Professor Bush; and consequently the latter had the advantage of examining it previous to his own act of publication, and "perceived that their plans were, in many respects, different." The fact is, the main object of Professor Bush was to concentrate the collective wisdom of his predecessors, with the whole of their late improvements, in a sound, practical grammar, without hazarding any thing of his own, saving his judicious discrimination and the strikingly illustrative character of his style; while, on the other hand, it appears to be the design of Professor Nordheimer to pursue his own particular speculations in advancing the new course of philosophical investigation to which Ewald gave birth. The work of Professor Nordheimer does not stand at all in the way of Professor Bush; and he publicly returns, in his preface, his "unfeigned thanks" to Professor N. for "the many valuable suggestions" he received at his hands. Let us therefore return to THE Professor, the new candidate for a high place among Hebrew grammarians.

The first thing which strikes us in Professor Bush's work is his Introduction, which, in that part which relates to the nature and history of the Shemitic tongues generally, is an able conveyancing and transmigration of the preface of the last edition of Gesenius' Elementary Grammar. This does great credit to the Professor's head and heart. It forms a very interesting article, and it is concluded by an excellent digest of the progress of Hebrew grammarians in their improvement of the philological art.

The next thing we come to is the very interesting investigation of the original consonantal functions of all the Hebrew letters. Professor Bush says, "These letters are not so properly the representatives of sounds, as of the position of the organs in the ineffectual attempt to utter sounds." Professor Nordheimer says:-" The first and most obvious division of words is into syllables, which these letters were designed to represent; while their farther subdivision into consonants and vowels was an after process. Thus the syllable ba was originally considered in the light of a single articulated sound; and it was not till considerable progress had been made in the investigation of the constituent elements of speech that it was discovered to consist in reality of two sounds-namely, a consonant, formed by the unclosing of the lips, and a vowel, or mere continuous emission of the voice. The Sanscrit, Bengali, and Ethiopic alphabets are instances of the syllabic system carried to its highest degree of perfection: in all of them a syllable, consisting of a consonant and a following short a, is represented by the consonant alone; in the two former, when any other vowel is required, it is expressed by an additional character, and in the Ethiopic a slight variation in the form of the consonant is made to answer the

same purpose. The Hebrew alphabet, on the contrary, furnishes the mere outline or skeleton of a word, which is to be filled up by the knowledge of the reader."

Professor Bush has subsequently well illustrated this stenographic form of consonantal writing, and obviated all appearance of difficulty as to its practical use, when the language was a spoken one. (Pp. 36, 37.) The first written Hebrew language was indubitably stenographical; and we cannot at all doubt of the practical reality of this method, when even in the present day, and in modern languages, though furnished with the regular number of vowels, our eye alone is no guide to the pronunciation of words unless assisted by oral knowledge. The best system of literal writing leaves a great deal to be supplied by the norma loquendi, the general usage. Nevertheless the theory of Nordheimer, that the ehevi consonants acquired their character of vowels, or matres lectionis, from possessing an organic affinity with them in their emission by the voice, and that they thus naturally coalesced with the several corresponding vowel points by a physiological assimilation, so as to produce the quiescence of the former, however ingenious it may be in the principle, does not satisfy all the difficulties of the case. For though the general stenographical nature of Hebrew syllabication be admitted, yet the ehevi may originally have possessed, though with a very imperfect use, all the force and nature of vowels. That they were such, appears to be a matter of little doubt; for in that character they passed into the Greek language, in the time of Cadmus, 1400 years before Christ, and have thence held their place as such in all the European alphabets. Their subsequent consonantal use may be easily accounted for. As they enjoyed but a very limited employment in Hebrew syllabication as vowels, and as the original pronunciation was lost or began to change, they were altogether abandoned to their consonantal value, in order to make way for the greater facility of the vowel punctuation. Here Nordheimer's organic theory may very aptly come in to explain the reverse of his position, viz. how the original vowel letters came to acquire the power of consonants, and occasionally quiesce in their homogeneous points; and how their condition as matres lectionis was referred to as an antecedent state, which they had not altogether lost, and which served to explain their present office. That the ehevi were originally radically vowels, may be held in perfect consistence with the belief that the greatest portion of the language was left to its stenographical consonantal method, without availing itself of their general use. It was reserved for the ingenious Greeks, through the cognate Phenician character, to apply the original vowels to a more extensive syllabic organization. It would be absurd to believe, on the ordinary hypothesis, that the first character of a primitive alphabet, which has passed into European languages as a most important vowel, was first devised merely as an arbitrary sign without any sound at all. This would be quite contrary to Nordheimer's doctrine, that the first alphabetical letters were designed to represent syllables, a compound sound of a vowel and a consonant, when by this arrangement we have an aleph perfectly soundless. In the Babylonish captivity, seven hundred years before Christ, the pronunciation of the Hebrew must have changed; and

the ehevi in the very imperfect state of Hebrew syllabication, having never been applied to any general use as vowels on account of the original inadvertence of the inventors as to their general availability, must have become perfectly useless as such. The cumbrous machinery of points was afterward adopted, no matter when, to supply the deficiency; and where these matres lectionis did not still live in their cognate consonantal sound, they showed their original office by quiescing with their new equivalents. In the meantime, by a happier and more matured system, they maintained their original value when transplanted in the languages of the West.

Professor Bush's forte lies in his power of popular illustration; and if he departs in a measure from the technical forms of grammatical precision, his periphrastic style, perhaps, sooner conveys the sense intended by the philological nomenclature of other grammarians. In passing over his sections on the points, accents, tones, consonant and vowel changes, we find him perfectly successful in making all these difficulties familiarly easy and intelligible to the reader. He has always ready some obvious analogy to explain his positions: he has always at hand some case by which to show the use and importance of the subject on which he happens to treat. Thus the power of the accents in changing the sense of a sentence is happily illustrated by two or three examples. He has always some physical or metaphysical reason when necessary that is easy, simple, and strikingly obvious, to explain and impress more vividly on the memory those phenomena which, in the school of Stuart, and even in the grammar of Nordheimer, freeze into rigid forms, or stand like some incomprehensible mummies in the Egyptian catacombs. We could make numerous quotations, only the burden of Hebrew typography involved in them would render them too cumbersome for general acceptance.

In passing forward to the grammatical structure and forms of words, page 100, we have Ewald's theory on the primitive elements of the parts of speech:-" It has been usual with most grammarians and lexicographers," says Prof. Bush, "to regard the verb as the most primitive element of language, the parent stock from which nearly every other part of speech is derived. This is doubtless true to a considerable extent; but the more correct theory seems to be, to consider the verb and noun as collateral derivatives from an abstract root consisting of consonants only, and involving, as it were, both the nominal and verbal meaning, either of which may be developed by means of certain vowel points. Thus, instead of deriving melek, a king, with some grammarians, from malak, to reign, or vice versa, with others, the true method probably is, to refer them both to the abstract root mlk, which is to be considered intrinsically neither as verb nor noun, but which becomes a verb if written malak, or a noun if written melek. According to this, therefore, the root, strictly speaking, exists only as a pure abstraction, as an invisible root, hidden, as it were, in the earth, whose trunk and branches are alone to be seen." Hence Professor Bush lays it down as axiom, in regard to the written Hebrew, that consonants are essential, while vowels are merely accidental; the former denoting the most elementary and radical ideas, as well as sounds of words; the latter expressing their various nicer modifications and distincVOL. X.-Oct., 1839.

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tions of sense." Now as language was spoken before it was written, this theory to be correct must hold good in both cases. And, indeed, the idea of a king, and of reigning, might have both floated in the mind in the general mlk before it was divided on the tongue by the organs of utterance, through the interposition of vowels. If generalization be the nature of the first idea of the mind, and discrimination be that of the second, which is no doubt the case, the transition from the first to the second in the lightning process of thought may be easily imagined. The first idea prepared the mouth, the second gave it its specific form, and opened it in speech, according as the mind felt its desire to express the one derivative idea or the other. It is very immaterial, therefore, whether the language was first written or first spoken; suffice that it was first thought, in the several intellectual transitions of the brain. This philosophy of language may be ridiculed by those who pride themselves on what are called common-sense views of the question; men who never ascend higher than secondary causes- -who, because they have never been accustomed to investigate the origin of things, are contented to take facts as they find them, satisfied that such is their nature. But a just development of the philosophy of language opens a glorious arena for mental exercise and discipline; and Professor Bush cannot be too highly extolled for introducing philosophical illustration in a practical elementary grammar, which answers one great purpose, if no other, to teach the learner how to observe, and to apply the same spirit of observation to other subjects.

To show the general difference of style and manner between Nordheimer and Professor Bush, we may take what each says of the future apocopate:-Nordheimer says, page 118, "When the future expresses a wish or command, or is connected to the succeeding word by makkeph, it is announced with greater brevity than usual,--in the former case, on account of the quickness of utterance appropriate to the expression of a command or urgent solicitation; and in the latter, in consequence of the loss of the accent, which enabled the ultimate long vowel to form a mixed syllable.' Professor Bush: "As far as this contracted formation depends upon the sense, it is doubtless to be accounted for from the fact, that in expressing prohibition, dissuasion, exhortation, earnest wishing, and the like, for which the apocopated future is principally employed, the utterance is naturally somewhat abrupt and hurried, and the term employed thrown into its shortest possible form. The effect of this quickened enunciation is obvious. The stress of the voice being expended upon the beginning of the word, the tone is of course retracted, long vowels are shortened, and the final syllable being consequently but slightly enounced, it is easily lost altogether in sound; and when once lost in sound, it easily disappears in form.. The mode of apocopation is therefore twofold: (1.) By shortening the long vowel; (2.) By casting away the final letter and vowel." An ordinary critic would perhaps here say that Professor Bush has used a multiplicity of words to express what Nordheimer has conveyed in a more concise and a neater form. But what is the state of the case? Professor Bush, with his periphrastic flourish of trumpets, invests every thing he says with importance. His design is to arrest attention to a fact. He has gained his object. Professor