ractice, to parse _mine_ as _possessing a word_ understood,
before which it cannot properly be used. The word _mine_ is here evidently
employed as a substitute for the two words, _my_ and _book_."--_Wells,
ibid._ This note appears to me to be, in many respects, faulty. In the
first place, its whole design was, to disprove what is true. For, bating
the mere difference of _person_, the author's example above is equal to
this: "Your pleasures are past, _W. H. Wells's_ are to come." The ellipsis
of "_pleasures_", is evident in both. But _ellipsis_ is not _substitution_;
no, nor is _equivalence. Mine_, when it suggests an ellipsis of the
governing noun, is _equivalent_ to _my and that noun_; but certainly, not
"_a substitute for the two words_." It is a substitute, or pronoun, for the
_name of the speaker or writer_; and so is _my_; both forms representing,
and always agreeing with, that name or person only. No possessive agrees
with what governs it; but every pronoun ought to agree with that for which
it stands. Secondly, if the note above cited does not aver, in its first
sentence, that the pronouns in question _are "governed by nouns
understood_," it comes much nearer to saying this, than a writer should who
meant to deny it. In the third place, the example, "This book is mine," is
not a good one for its purpose. The word "_mine_" may be regularly parsed
as a possessive, without supposing any ellipsis; for "_book_," the name of
the thing possessed, is given, and in obvious connexion with it. And
further, the matter affirmed is _ownership_, requiring _different cases_;
and not the _identity_ of something under different names, which must be
put in the _same case_. In the fourth place, to mistake regimen for
possession, and thence speak of _one word "as possessing" an other_, a mode
of expression occurring twice in the foregoing note, is not only
unscholarlike, but positively absurd. But, possibly, the author may have
meant by it, to ridicule the choice phraseology of the following Rule: "A
noun or pronoun in the possessive case, is governed by _the noun it
possesses_."--_Kirkham's Gram._, p. 181; _Frazee's_, 1844, p. 25.

[211] In respect to the _numbers_, the following text is an uncouth
exception: "Pass _ye_ away, _thou_ inhabitant of Saphir."--_Micah_, i, 11.
The singular and the plural are here strangely confounded. Perhaps the
reading should be, "Pass _thou_ away, _O_ inhabitant of Saphir." Nor is the
Bible free from _a