266 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



cess in conveying his ideas fully and accurately. In the process of 

 transfer he has reduced the friction and the waste of inertia to the ut- 

 most. The least amount of work has been lost in the operation of two 

 machines, the giving and the receiving, which form temporarily a 

 connected system ; and the active recipient's attention has been applied 

 with good economy. 



Men do not require to be highly civilized before the need is felt for 

 the registration of ideas in addition to their oral transfer. Ideas are 

 first symbolized, and the translation of such symbols into words soon 

 suggests that words may be independently symbolized. The process 

 continues until words are analyzed into their components, and these 

 also are symbolized as letters. The art of spelling is thus born. But 

 whatever the stage of symbolization, the written idea can never be more 

 than an imperfect reproduction of the spoken idea, because symbols 

 are arbitrary. The interpretation of a group of symbols is a synthetic 

 process, and the opportunities for misunderstanding are fairly well 

 proportioned to the complexity of the word machine employed. 



The art of spelling is thus a development from early crude attempts 

 to register spoken ideas and spoken words. The same word is often 

 pronounced so differently by different speakers as to be scarcely recog- 

 nizable. The English language when spoken by a highland Scotch 

 or Welsh tongue to the ear of an American mountaineer fulfills quite 

 well the dictum, commonly ascribed to Talleyrand, that the object of 

 language is to conceal thought. From the very nature of the case spell- 

 ing must vary as language varies. Orthodoxy may perhaps be as 

 unchangeable as its representatives are prone to claim, but spelling has 

 never been uniform, is not now uniform, and ought not to be more 

 uniform than is the spoken language among the best educated scholars 

 in great centers of population. 



So long as literature was limited to manuscripts copied by pro- 

 fessional scribes and seen only by the few who could read, and whose 

 tastes prompted them to indulgence in such pleasure, spelling was as 

 unsettled as forms of speech. The invention of printing not only pro- 

 duced a vast increase in the diffusion of reading matter, but tended 

 to unify and give definiteness to the forms of symbolization. The 

 railroad, the steamship, the telegraph and the printing press have 

 been operated conjointly to bring all nations into closer communication 

 than was ever foreshadowed by the optimistic dreams of our fore- 

 fathers ; but the adoption of a single language for the civilized world is 

 still so far away in the future that no one gives the matter any serious 

 consideration. Such unification is conceivable, but if ever approached 

 it must be by gradual and almost imperceptible evolution, and not by 

 prescription from any source, however scholarly and apparently au- 

 thoritative. A new language, like Volaptik, even though theoretically 

 perfect, has not the ghost of a chance of adoption, because nobody is 



