<P> In 1840, Richard Taylor also condemned split infinitives as a "disagreeable affectation", and in 1859, Solomon Barrett, Jr., called them "a common fault". However, the issue seems not to have attracted wider public attention until Henry Alford addressed it in his Plea for the Queen's English in 1864: </P> <P> A correspondent states as his own usage, and defends, the insertion of an adverb between the sign of the infinitive mood and the verb . He gives as an instance, "to scientifically illustrate". But surely this is a practice entirely unknown to English speakers and writers . It seems to me, that we ever regard the to of the infinitive as inseparable from its verb . And, when we have already a choice between two forms of expression, "scientifically to illustrate" and "to illustrate scientifically", there seems no good reason for flying in the face of common usage . </P> <P> Others followed, among them Bache, 1869 ("The to of the infinitive mood is inseparable from the verb"); William B. Hodgson, 1889; and Raub, 1897 ("The sign to must not be separated from the remaining part of the infinitive by an intervening word"). </P> <P> Even as these authorities were condemning the split infinitive, others were endorsing it: Brown, 1851 (saying some grammarians had criticized it and it was less elegant than other adverb placements but sometimes clearer); Hall, 1882; Onions, 1904; Jespersen, 1905; and Fowler and Fowler, 1906 . Despite the defence by some grammarians, by the beginning of the 20th century the prohibition was firmly established in the press . In the 1907 edition of The King's English, the Fowler brothers wrote: </P>

Do not split infinitives is a rule of english based on