OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 189 



nunciation everywhere ; they would have the pronunciation of a living 

 and intellectual race, consisting of twelve or fifteen millions of souls, — 

 of a race who are making gigantic strides in education, literature, and 

 science, and who are destined to restore the fair regions and the sunny 

 islands of the -3^^gean Sea, which have been so long blighted by the 

 presence of bai'barous conquerors, to civilization and Christianity." 



Mr. B. A. Gould remarked that the subject was interesting, 

 but he was not prepared to abandon the received pronuncia- 

 tion, and to adopt the accentual system of the modern Greeks. 

 He thought the system generally adopted by the English and 

 Americans furnished the means of a uniform standard, and 

 that a departure from it would introduce confusion. Be- 

 sides, the Modern Greek pronunciation not only destroyed 

 the rhythm, but injured the effect of those passages in Greek 

 poetry, in which the sound was supposed to correspond to 

 the sense, as in the TroXvcj^koia^oLo 6d\a(xa7]<i of Homer, which, 

 with the modern pronunciation, would be polyphleesveo tha- 

 lasses. For these, and other reasons, he was not in favor of 

 adopting the Modern Greek pronunciation. 



Mr, Felton replied, that, in point of fact, the pronunciation 

 of the present day in Europe and America furnished no 

 uniform standard. Even in England, the pronunciation of 

 Greek is far from uniform ; and every nation differs from 

 every other nation. In America different systems prevail in 

 different parts of the country, and in many places there is no 

 system at all. Now, by adopting the Modern Greek pronun- 

 ciation, all nations would have a standard easily accessible ; 

 and really, it seemed to him that the only way to have any 

 standard at all was to take the pronunciation of the living 

 Greeks, just as we take the pronunciation of living French- 

 men for our standard in the French. 



As to those passages alluded to by Mr. Gould, in which 

 the sound is an echo to the sense, no doubt there is much in 

 that idea ; but it still remains to decide what is precisely the 

 sense intended in any given passage. The words cited by 

 Mr. Gould are part of a line, describing the priest Chryses 



