§489. Participles
Participles denote time as present, past, or future with respect to the time of the verb in their clause.
Thus the Present Participle represents the action as in progress at the time indicated by the tense of the verb, the Perfect as completed, and the Future as still to take place.
J. H. Allen and J. B. Greenough, New Latin Grammar (Boston: Ginn, 1903). Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.