is lecture, Dionysius Thrax published the first elementary grammar of
Greek at Rome. Empirical grammar had thus been transplanted to Rome, the
Greek grammatical terminology was translated into Latin, and in this new
Latin garb it has travelled now for nearly two thousand years over the
whole civilized world. Even in India, where a different terminology had
grown up in the grammatical schools of the Brahmans, a terminology in some
respects more perfect than that of Alexandria and Rome, we may now hear
such words as _case_, and _gender_, and _active_ and _passive_, explained
by European teachers to their native pupils. The fates of words are
curious indeed, and when I looked the other day at some of the examination
papers of the government schools in India, such questions as--"Write the
genitive case of Siva," seemed to reduce whole volumes of history into a
single sentence. How did these words, genitive case, come to India? They
came from England, they had come to England from Rome, to Rome from
Alexandria, to Alexandria from Athens. At Athens, the term _case_, or
_ptosis_, had a philosophical meaning; at Rome, _casus_ was merely a
literal translation; the original meaning of _fall_ was lost, and the word
dwindled down to a mere technical term. At Athens, the philosophy of
language was a counterpart of the philosophy of the mind. The terminology
of formal logic and formal grammar was the same. The logic of the Stoics
was divided into two parts,(97) called _rhetoric_ and _dialectic_, and the
latter treated, first, "On that which signifies, or language;" secondly,
"On that which is signified, or things." In their philosophical language
_ptosis_, which the Romans translated by _casus_, really meant fall; that
is to say, the inclination or relation of one idea to another, the falling
or resting of one word on another. Long and angry discussions were carried
on as to whether the name of _ptosis_, or fall, was applicable to the
nominative; and every true Stoic would have scouted the expression of
_casus rectus_, because the subject or the nominative, as they argued, did
not fall or rest on anything else, but stood erect, the other words of a
sentence leaning or depending on it. All this is lost to us when we speak
of cases.

And how are the dark scholars in the government schools of India to guess
the meaning of _genitive_? The Latin _genitivus_ is a mere blunder, for
the Greek word _genike_ could never mean _genitivus_. _Geniti