o errors, in stead of avoiding both: these, as well as
their suggestions of sameness or difference of import between the
participle and the participial noun, require some farther extension of my
observations in this place.

OBS. 25.--Upon the classification of words, as parts of speech,
distinguished according to their natures and uses, depends the whole scheme
of grammatical science. And it is plain, that a bad distribution, or a
confounding of such things as ought to be separated, must necessarily be
attended with inconveniences to the student, for which no skill or learning
in the expounder of such a system can ever compensate. The absurdity of
supposing with Horne Tooke, that the same word can never be used so
differently as to belong to different parts of speech, I have already
alluded to more than once. The absolute necessity of classing words, not
according to their derivation merely, but rather according to their sense
and construction, is too evident to require any proof. Yet, different as
are the natures and the uses of _verbs, participles_, and _nouns_, it is no
uncommon thing to find these three parts of speech confounded together; and
that too to a very great extent, and by some of our very best grammarians,
without even an attempt on their part to distinguish them. For instances of
this glaring fault and perplexing inconsistency, the reader may turn to the
books of W. Allen and T. O. Churchill, two of the best authors that have
ever written on English grammar. Of the participle the latter gives no
formal definition, but he represents it as "_a form_, in which _the action_
denoted by _the verb_ is capable of being joined _to a noun_ as _its
quality_, or accident."--_Churchill's New Gram._, p. 85. Again he says,
"That the participle is _a mere mode of the verb_ is manifest, if our
definition of a verb be admitted."--_Ib._, p. 242. While he thus identifies
the participle with the verb, this author scruples not to make what he
calls the imperfect participle perform all the offices of a _noun_: saying,
"Frequently too it is used as a noun, admits a preposition or an article
before it, becomes a plural by taking _s_ at the end, and governs a
possessive case: as, 'He who has _the comings_ in of a prince, may be
ruined _by his_ own _gaming_, or his _wife's squandering_.'"--_Ib._, p.
144. The plural here exhibited, if rightly written, would have the _s_, not
at the end, but in the middle; for _comings-in_, (an obsole