308 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



one grouping which shall surpass all others, and which cannot be attained 

 except through a careful analysis of the structure of our Language as exhibited 

 in its ordinary written usage. The Keyboard herewith submitted is the 

 result of researches extending over the leisure hours of three years, and 

 involving no less than seven million separate scrutinies of 165,000 words, 

 embodied in the prose writings of representative living authors in various 

 departments of literature and science. It is, as will shortly appear, appro- 

 priately named the " Combinational " keyboard. 



Those who have not looked closely into the structural habits of our 

 Language would be surprised at the very large number of words in which 

 certain combinations of letters are always found together. It might almost 

 be said that not a single sentence, however short, can be written without 

 including one or several of them. On each page of every English book they 

 are to be seen in hundreds. It is, therefore, self-evident that if such com- 

 binations be suitably grouped on the keyboard for easy word-making, it will 

 be found that those words in which they are embodied — the greater number 

 of them being the most commonly used of all words — will " come together " 

 under the fingers almost en bloc, and approximate most closely to the habits 

 of the mind and pen that have been fostered by centuries of uniform usage. 

 Many hundreds of the commonest words are, from start to finish, wholly 

 constructed of these combinations, and many thousands of other words are 

 largely combinational in structure. 



Combinations may be classified as either fixed or variable, the former class 

 being chiefly associated with the consonants, and the latter with the vowels 

 and semi-vowels. For the new keyboard a selection of thirty-eight of the 

 most representative fixed combinations in the English Language has been 

 made, and their places and connexions assigned to the most efficient positions 

 on the keyboard in accordance with the order of their frequency in various 

 styles of prose. With a view to arrive at reliable statistics as to frequency 

 of occurrence, each combination has been separately combed out page by page 

 from a mass of prose which would fill a crown octavo volume embracing 

 550 pages of brevier print. This research, though extremely taxing to the 

 eyes, brain, and patience, has been of the utmost importance for the formula- 

 tion of a literary and scientific Keyboard — scientific, that is to say, in the 

 sense of being based on a precise induction of the facts involved in the structure 

 of our Language. 



PRACTICAL 



The important points to be considered in the arrangement of a perfect 

 keyboard are three in number : 



1. The habits of the hands. 



2. The habits of the Language. 



3. The associational habits of the mind. 



I. In typing the really capable or effective fingers are the fore and middle 

 fingers of each hand. The third finger can be used for letters lying on the 

 outskirts of the keyboard, but, unless specially trained, it is naturally a 

 somewhat unreliable finger in quick typing (as also similarly in pianoforte 

 playing).! The thumb and little finger are not used on the keyboard. In 

 brief, the first and second fingers are those which are most instinctively used 

 by typists because their touch is always quite firm and certain. 



* Sir C. H. H. Parry, D.Mus., calls the third finger the clumsy finger. 

 (J. Seb. Bach. 1909, p. 114.) 



Some expert typists use only the forefinger of each hand, and for this 

 type of fingering the new keyboard is an ideal one ; but it must be regarded 

 as a fussy and undesirable type of fingering. 



