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LATIN GRAMMAR

FOR SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES

FOUNDED ON COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR

BY

JOSEPH H. ALLEN

AND

JAMES B. GREENOUGH

THIRD EDITION.

BOSTON

PUBLISHED BY GINN BROTHERS

3 BEACON STREET

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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by

J. H. ALLEN AND J. B. GREENOUGH, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.

CAMBRIDGE:

PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON.

PREFACE.

OUR aim has been to prepare, within moderate compass, a complete Latin grammar, to be used from the beginning of the study of Latin until the end of a college course. The whole has been composed from our own point of view, and is, in all essentials, a new and independent work. But we have used freely the standard authorities, as well those of the older scholastic as of the newer critical and scientific schools. In several points, particularly the topical arrangement of the Syntax, we have followed the outline sketched a few years ago by Professor Allen, of the University of Wisconsin.

We have endeavored to adapt the scientific (philological) method of inflection by stem and termination to the system used by the Romans themselves and handed down by general custom to our time. While the five Declensions are retained, with the old distinctions on which they are founded, at the same time the true philological difference, that of stems, is fully exhibited as the real basis of noun-forms. In the same way the true distinctions of verb-stems are adapted to the existing four Conjugations. We have preferred this to the "crude-form" system, partly because of the practical difficulty that our lexicons do not give

stems, but words; chiefly, however, from the inherent difficulty of a crude-form system in a language so decayed as the Latin.

In respect to the actual forms of the language, we have not thought it necessary to go back of Neue's "Formenlehre," upon which we have relied, and which teachers will find digested so far as seems to come within the limits of a work like the present.

In the Syntax, our design has been to leave no principle untouched which a student needs during his school and college course. We have attempted to show, as far as possible, the reason and origin of constructions, for which purpose notes have been inserted where it seemed desirable. Many things in the treatment of the Subjunctive, of the Protasis and Apodosis (in which we have followed Professor Goodwin's analysis), of Temporal particles, of the Infinitive and Participles, and much of the matter of the notes, appear for the first time in a school-book, and are the results of the authors' own investigations in Comparative Grammar. The Syntax is illustrated by upwards of a thousand examples cited from classical authorities, principally from Cicero; besides nearly as many brief phrases in illustration of minor points, particularly the use of prepositions and cases.

In Prosody and Versification we have taken a little wider range than usual, so as to enable the student to read metrically any poetry he will meet in his college

course.

In the typography and mechanical arrangement of the page, we have sought to give every aid that can be rendered in that way to the easy comprehension of the subject. The sub-sections in larger type (num

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