Dr. Latham, too, and Prof.  Child, whose erroneous teaching on this point is still more marvellous, not only inculcate the idea that possessives in form may be in apposition, but seem to suppose that two possessive endings are essential to the relation.  Forgetting all such English as we have in the phrases, “John the Baptist’s head,”—­“For Jacob my servant’s sake,”—­“Julius Caesar’s Commentaries,”—­they invent sham expressions, too awkward ever to have come to their knowledge from any actual use,—­such as, “John’s the farmer’s wife,”—­“Oliver’s the spy’s evidence,”—­and then end their section with the general truth, “For words to be in apposition with each other, they must be in the same case.”—­Elementary Grammar, Revised Edition, p. 152.  What sort of scholarship is that in which fictitious examples mislead even their inventors?

[345] In Professor Fowler’s recent and copious work, “The English Language in its Elements and Forms,” our present Reciprocals are called, not Pronominal Adjectives, but “Pronouns,” and are spoken of, in the first instance, thus:  “Sec.248.  A RECIPROCAL PRONOUN is one that implies the mutual action of different agents.  EACH OTHER, and ONE ANOTHER, are our reciprocal forms, which are treated exactly as if they were compound pronouns, taking for their genitives, each other’s, one another’s. Each other is properly used of two, and one another of more.”  The definition here given takes for granted what is at least disputable, that “each other,” or “one another,” is not a phrase, but is merely “one pronoun.”  But, to none of his three important positions here taken, does the author himself at all adhere.  In Sec.451, at Note 3, he teaches thus:  “‘They love each other.’  Here each is in the nominative case in apposition with they, and other is in the objective case.  ’They helped one another.’  Here one is in apposition with they, and another is in the objective case.”  Now, by this mode of parsing, the reciprocal terms “are treated,” not as “compound pronouns,” but as phrases consisting of distinct or separable words:  and, as being separate or separable words, whether they be Adjectives or Pronouns, they conform not to his definition above.  Out of the sundry instances in which, according to his own showing, he has misapplied one or the other of these phrases, I cite the following:  (1.) “The two ideas of Science and Art differ from one another as the understanding differs from the will.”—­Fowler’s Gram., 1850, Sec.180.  Say,—­“from each other;” or,—­“one from the other.” (2.) “THOU, THY, THEE, are etymologically related to each other.”—­Ib., Sec.216.  Say,—­“to one an other;” because there are “more” than “two.” (3.) “Till within some centuries, the Germans, like the French and the