NOTES 103 



by scientific experts, and of how a Grade I certificate from the Bureau of 

 Plant Industry was a good security with a bank. 



Replying to a question, Mr. Brierley mentioned that the same bureau 

 kept a record of all plant research planned or carried out in the United States, 

 and published a programme. 



He hoped to see a quinquennial international conference of biologists in 

 this country. 



Mr. F. T. Brooks, proposing a vote of thanks to Mr. Brierley, said that 

 an American visitor to the British Association at Cardiff had commented on 

 the wide knowledge of their subject generally shown by British biologists. 



Dr. J. W. Evans, F.R.S., proposing a vote of thanks to Sir Daniel Hall, 

 added a further plea for international fellowship and understanding in science. 



English Rhythms 



On March 5 Sir Ronald Ross delivered a lecture at Oxford to the 

 Oxford Branch of the EngUsh Association on the subject of Poetry. Mr. 

 John Masefield was in the chair, and the President of the Royal Society (Pro- 

 fessor Sherrington) and the President of Magdalen College (Sir Herbert Warren) 

 were present. The lecturer dealt particularly with the subject of English 

 Rhythms, of which he had long made a special study, and illustrated his 

 remarks by reading examples written by himself. He said that the recent 

 amazing development of the art of music had done much, not exactly to 

 eclipse the elder Muse, Poetry, but to place her upon a more remote pedestal ; 

 but he honoured poetry more because of the intellectual appeal contained in it, 

 and admitted that he was very much out of the fashion as he preferred man's 

 intellect to all his other faculties. " Evidently both the arts have or can 

 have rhythm almost exactly in common ; and while the one adds tone- 

 music to the rhythm the other adds phone-music to it, besides the intellectual 

 appeal. It is the combination of the rhythm and the tone-music which bestows 

 upon the younger art her intense power of immediate penetration ; and I 

 do not, therefore, agree with those who would divest Poetry both of her 

 rhythm and her phone-music and leave her shivering on her intellectual height 

 with nothing to clothe her except perhaps only some thin sentimentalism 

 of the day. To take first what I mean by phone-music — the balance and 

 interplay of the vowels and consonants — I think that our language loses 

 much by the horrible spelhng in which it is disguised. England is a country 

 of poets largely because our language is a harsh one. This seems a paradox ; 

 but it is not one, because English can be so rendered as to give a most rich 

 and varied phone-music by selection of the proper phones, and it is largely 

 the contrast between the harsh progress of our ordinary speech and the 

 melody of the selected speech in our best poetry which moves us. The con- 

 trast is much greater than in the more mellifluous tongues, such as Greek, the 

 Romance languages, and Hindustani or Burmese, let us say — and therefore 

 the more (subconsciously) gratifying. Now our spelUng almost ignores most 

 of our softest breathed phones — the rich dh is turned into the sharper th, 

 the z into the hissing s, the zh into sh ; our long, rolling vowels are almost lost 

 in our hieroglyphics ; and there is little relation between the printed and 

 the uttered word. I am glad to see that some of our highest poets, especially 

 the Poet Laureate and Mr. Doughty, sometimes rebel against the tyranny ; 

 and I have for years put my own humble verses into a form of phonetic or 

 rather homographic script, which is carefully arranged to give what I consider 

 to be beautiful spelling, as distinct from ordinary ugly phonetic spelling, 

 and which 1 call Musaic spelUng, as it is especially designed for verse. I have 

 indeed printed some pieces (in my Lyra Modulata) in a style of this kind 

 (to the horror of my friends and the confusion of my enemies) and intend to 

 i)ring out a book in it shortly ! . . . Regarding rhythm, I have always 



