cases, omit it, and insert only such points as the reading requires; as,
"For want of doing this, Judge Blackstone has, in Book IV, Chap. 17,
committed some most ludicrous errors."--_Cobbett's Gram._, Let. XIX, 251.
To insert points needlessly, is as bad a fault as to omit them when they
are requisite. In Wm. Day's "Punctuation Reduced to a System," (London,
1847,) we have the following obscure and questionable RULE: "_Besides
denoting a grammatical pause_, the _full point_ is used to mark
_contractions_, and is requisite after _every abbreviated word_, as well as
after _numeral letters._"--Page 102. This seems to suggest that both a
pause and a contraction may be denoted by the same point. But what are
properly called "_contractions_," are marked not by the period, but by the
apostrophe, which is no sign of pause; and the confounding of these with
words "_abbreviated_," makes this rule utterly absurd. As for the period
"after _numeral letters_," if they really needed it at all, they would need
it _severally_, as do the abbreviations; but there are none of them, which
do not uniformly dispense with it, when not final to the number; and they
may as well dispense with it, in like manner, whenever they are not final
to the sentence.

OBS. 4.--Of these letters, Day gives this account: "_M._ denotes _mille_,
1,000; _D., dimidium mille_, half a thousand, or 500; _C. centum_, 100;
_L._ represents the lower half of _C._, and expresses 50; _X._ resembles
_V._ _V._, the one upright, the other inverted, and signifies 10; _V._
stands for 5, because its sister letter U is the fifth vowel; and _I._
signifies 1, probably because it is the plainest and simplest letter in the
alphabet."--_Day's Punctuation_, p. 103. There is some fancy in this. Dr.
Adam says, "The letters employed for this purpose [i.e., to express
_numbers_.] were C. I. L. V. X."--_Latin and Eng. Gram._, p. 288. And
again: "A thousand is marked thus CI[C-reverserd], which in later times was
_contracted_ into M. _Five hundred_ is marked thus, I[C-reversed], or by
_contraction_, D."--_Ib._ Day inserts periods thus: "IV. means 4; IX., 9;
XL., 40; XC., 90; CD., 400; CM., 900."--Page 703. And again: "4to.,
_quarto_, the fourth of a sheet of paper; 8vo., _octavo_, the eighth part
of a sheet of paper; 12mo., _duodecimo_, the twelfth of a sheet of paper;
N. L., 8 deg.., 9'., 10''., North latitude, eight degrees, nine minutes, ten
seconds."--Page 104. But IV may mean 4, withou