sometimes called the elative case, is a term applied to one of the case-forms of nouns and pronouns. One thing with another, or its predicate beginning or begotten of it, is in the genitive case. It may be called the "whereof" case: as "the fear of death," "the love of home," "the works of God," "the cup is full of wine." The natural possessive and genitive cases are clearly different, though in most languages they are both classed under the same case-form; for one thing may be the begetter of another which it may not possess, or may be the possessor of a thing which it may not have begotten. "William's field," means the field of which William is the possessor but not the begetter, while "the love of money," or "the fear of death," does not mean the love or fear which money or death possesses, as neither money nor death can possess love or fear; but this love and fear are, in the mind of man, begotten by money and by death; and in the sentence "the cup is full of wine," the wine is the begetter of the predicate "full." Since one thing with another, or its predicate beginning or begotten by it, is in the genitive case, it follows that a thing may have two genitive relations—one thing to another thing itself, and another to its predicate, as "the stab of a dagger," in which the dagger is the begetter or generator of the stab;" "the cup is full of wine," where the "wine" is not the begetter of the "cup," but of its predicate "full." It is idle to object that to make so nice a distinction as that between the relation of the thing A to the thing B, and the relation of the thing A to the predicate of the thing B, is to make case needlessly perplexing; for some nations, as the Finnic, have shown such discriminations in the case-forms of their languages, and we could not understand any language in which such discriminations might be made without the distinction first existing in the mind. The "genitive" is distinguished from the "possessive" by Euren in his Finsk Språkstora, in which he calls the latter the "genitive-possessive." From the want of this distinction in the Greek and Latin languages arises much of the perplexity in treating of the syntax of the genitive case in their grammars. A clear example of the ambiguity arising from the same case-ending answering for both relations may be seen in 2 Cor. vi. 14, ἡ δύναμις τοῦ Χριστοῦ συνέχει ἡμᾶς. If τοῦ Χριστοῦ is possessive, it means "the love of Christ for us;" whereas if it is genitive, it means "our love for him." See Bloomfield on the passage; and Barnes's Philological Grammar, London, 1854.