GRAMMAR is the systematic treatment of the expression of thought by means of guage. Grammar is often called a science, but in its present state it cannot rank with science$ like astronosny, I or chemistry, for instance. For one thing, it has not the power of predic tion. Adams and Le Verrier, the one in France, the other in England, were able, from ob served disturbances in the solar- system, to de termine that there must be a yet undiscovered planet, and to calculate its orbit and position so accurately that observers, turning their glasses on the specified locality in the heavens, found the planet Neptune. Grammar has no such power. All the linguists-of Europe could not have predicted in advance of discovery what the -Chinese language would be like; nor could all the linguists of the world determine what would be the language of some people of unknown origin who might be discovered to-morrow. The laws of chemistry appear to be universal. The same elements exist in the stars, the planets and the sun, as upon the earth, and so far as our knowledge yet reaches, only the same. • Helium was first discovered by the spectroscope in the sun, hut by later re search found upon the earth. Hydrogen and oxygen will combine in the very same propor tions to form water in India as in Europe. But grammar can command no such certainty. Its facts change from tribe to tribe, from dia lect to dialect and with most puzzling and baffling variations. The crossing of a mountain or a river throws the scholar , into some new system of grammatical• construction. Hence grammar for practical purposes must be viewed chiefly as a constructive art. In no department of learning is there less room for dogmatism. The scholar cannot say what shall be, or what should be. He does well if he can discover and clearly explain what is. The °rules* of grammar in any language can be no more than the statement of •the existing facts of that lan guage, as scholarship has discovered, and has been able to co-ordinate them.
It is obvious that language must have existed long before grammar. Man would find means of intelligent expression long be fore he could give systematic explanation of the reason for Various forms of expression.
In fact, the earliest grammar known to the modern world is the Sanskritgrammar of 8 Panini (about 304 ac.), giving in books, with 3,000 sections, the rules for classical Sanskrit. But Panini himself enumerates 64 grammatical predecessors, and the oldest Sanskrit literature is conventionally placed at 1500 s.c., though un doubtedly much older. A language, however, must exist in a tolerably complete form before a literature can be composed in it, so that the Sanskrit language reaches beyond the earliest Sanskrit literature far back into a dim antiq-, uity. The language had existed for unknown centuries, and had been the medium of a great literature for probably a thousand years before its grammar began. The impulse of the San skrit grammar was religious, for on the correct rendering of any verse of its sacred books salvation might depend. Greek grammar had an independent and later origin. Its impulse was philosophical and literary. The Homeric poems were the monuments it most eagerly studied. But those poems are placed at 1100 900a c., while the first notable, though discon nected, observations on grammar were made by Plato (427-347 a.c.), and Aristotle (384-322 P.c.), carried grammatical analysis so far as to distinguish nouns, verbs and connectives. It was not until Dionysitts Thrax ("The Thra cian"), who taught in Rome in the 1st cen tury ac., composed his 'Art of Grammar,' that the grammar of the Greek language had full development. Thus again about a thousand years elapsed after the fullness and power of the Greek language had been revealed in the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey,' before grammatical analysis was ready to explain what the language bad long since done. The record of English grammar is similar. The first really English grammar was claimed by William Bullokar, who published in 1586 'A Brief Grammar for English,' which he said was "the first grammar for English that ever was, except my gram mar at large" Ramsey, 'English Language and English Grammar' (pt. I, ch. 3, p. 49).