Physical Description   

First edition. xvii, 258 pp., 208:145 mm., wide margins, light age staining, stamps. A very good copy bound in modern half cloth over boards.

Detailed Description

Full title: Elements of Hebrew grammar to which is prefixed, a dissertation on the two modes of reading, with or without the points.

A first edition of a work on Hebrew grammar by Dr. Charles Wilson. He was born at Perth in 1744. He was ordained to the pastoral charge of Scone in 1774, where he laboured with acceptance till 1780, when, through the influence of the Earl of Kinnoul, Chancellor of the University, he was appointed to the Hebrew Chair in St. Mary's College. In thirteen years after, he was appointed to the more lucrative Chair of Ecclesiastical History in the same college. He died in September 1810, in his sixty-sixth year. He is also the author of The Book of the Apocrypha (Edinburgh, 1801).

Dr. Wilson is often quoted with regard to the question as to how many of the letters of the Hebrew letters are consonants. His opinion is as follows:... that I absolutely and unequivocally deny the position, that all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are consonants; and, after the most careful and minute inquiry, give it as my opinion, that of the twenty-two letters of which the Hebrew alphabet consists, five are vowels and seventeen are consonants. The five vowels by name are, Aleph, He, Vau, Yod, and Ain.

Hebrew Description

References

History of St. Andrews by Charles Roger (Edinburgh, 1949), p. 152; Wilson's Heb. Gram., pp. 6 and 8.