less full and complete than its predecessor. The Russian of the present day possesses in some respects a capacity of synthetic development hardly, if at all, excelled by that of any ancient tongue. For example, it takes the two independent words bez Boga, 'without God,' and fuses them into a theme from which it draws a whole list of derivatives. Thus, first, by adding an adjective suffix, it gets the adjective bezbozhnüǐ, 'godless;' a new suffix appended to this makes a noun, bezbozhnik, 'a godless person, an atheist;' the noun gives birth to a denominative verb, bezbozhnikhat, 'to be an atheist;' from this verb, again, come a number of derivatives, giving to the verbal idea the form of adjective, agent, act, and so on: the abstract is bezbozhnichestvo, 'the condition of being an atheist;' while, once more, a new verb is made from this abstract, namely bezbozhnichestvovat, literally 'to be in the condition of being a godless person.' A more intricate synthetic form than this could not easily be found in Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit; but it is no rare or exceptional case in the language from which we have extracted it; it rather represents, by a striking instance, the general character of Russian word-formation and derivation.
It is obviously futile, then, to talk of an uninterrupted and universal reduction of the resources of synthetic expression among the languages of the Indo-European family, or to allow ourselves to be forced by an alleged pervading tendency toward analytic forms into accepting synthesis, inflective richness, as the ultimate condition of the primitive tongue from which they are descended. If certain among them have replaced one or another part of their synthetic structure by analytic forms, if some—as the Germanic family in general, and, above all, the English—have taken on a prevailingly analytic character, these are facts which we are to seek to explain by a careful study of the circumstances and tendencies which have governed their respective development. If, moreover, as has been conceded, the general bent has for a long time been toward a diminution of synthesis and a predominance of analytic expressions, another question, of wider scope, is presented us for solution; but the form in which it offers itself is this: why should the forces which
