Whence all the strange sounds have been derived which have thus been pressed into the service of this human nomenclature, it would puzzle the most ingenious philologist to say.

This view, I fancy (though I am not sure), has escaped the philologists, but of course you know that all letters were originally pictures of things, and of what was S a picture, if not of the serpent?

This has, probably, led philologists to observe that the verb declarative of existence, was wanting, and discouraged them in the search of it.

Or rather, he so mistook "that able philologist" Murray; for he probably knew nothing of Walker in the matter; and accordingly changed the word "verbal" to "participial;" thus teaching, through all his hundred editions, except a few of the first, that participial nouns from verbs ending in y preceded by a consonant, are formed by merely "changing the y into i."