Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/215

attributed to the Greek Verb, 205 and spread of classical learning in England, it is above all things requisite that the elements of the ancient languages should be taught according to a system more in harmony with their real nature. As to the particular topics discust in the foregoing pages, it must be observed that they do not by any means stand all on the same footing. That there was no such tense in the Greek language as a second future active or middle, and that such futures were sheer fictions devised by gram- marians, for the sake of symmetry, in order that the second aorist might be made to come from a second future, like the first aorist from the first future, has been repeatedly main- tained by scholars, at least since Dawes in his usual tone of confidence asserted, pace grammaticorum in me praestan- du7n recipio futurtim secundum formae vel activae vel mediae in Graeco sermone nusquam reperiri. The same doctrine appears to have been held by some of the Greek gramma- rians themselves, as we learn from a fragment of Choero- boscus quoted by Buttmann from Bekker'^s Anecdota, p. 1290, where we read that Herodian said, no instance could be brought forward of a second future active in use, and that the instances cited by ApoUonius were either fabricated by him, — such as (pvywj Spajuio^ tvttco, which were never em- ployed by any ancient writer, — or were in fact present tenses with a future signification. Indeed the instances of futures fashioned according to the rules laid down for the second future are so exceedingly rare — barring such as come from verbs having a liquid for their characteristic letter, all of which form their futures after this manner, in consequence of the harshness the Greek ear seems to have found in a sibilant following a liquid, as appears for instance from the change of TiOev^ into TiOels^ of Xeyovcri into Xeyovaij of Xe- yovaa into Xeyovaa'^ of aparjv into dpf)r)i'^ and the like, ana- logous to the French change of oeils into yeuai^ ayeuls into ayeux — that they assuredly do not afford an adequate ground for including such a tense in the systematic complement of the Greek verb. Choeroboscus cites /cara/cAtcS from Eupolis : and we find 6/cxew in the Acts, 11. 17, and in Jeremiah, vi. IL The latter at all events is nothing more than an Alex- andrian corruption of the Attic future eKX^co^ (see Elmsley's