president's address. 1229 



l"n reciting the Alphabet, H is pronounced Aitch, a sound which 

 is absolutely alien to its power. In You and Union we have the 

 same initial guttural, Either and Ether have quite different dentals, 

 and S in Busy is Z. 



The list of anomalies may be indefinitely extended ; but we have 

 here enough for our purpose. I do not doubt but that the diffi- 

 culty of learning to read is doubled by the utter confusion of the 

 vowels, and doubled again by the misuse of the consonants. For 

 the latter disadvantage we have no remedy short of a purely 

 Phonetic system, such, for instance, as Pitman's Stenographic 

 character without abbreviations. For the former we could, if we 

 had any more courage than sheep, easily find one. Voltaire is said 

 to have defined Etymology as a science of language in which the 

 vowels went for nothing, and the consonants for very little. Taking 

 the jest for earnest, and applying this Etymological principle to 

 English, we should replace the historical vowel characters by real 

 and significant ones, as is done in the written language of 

 every other civilised nation. This would reduce the difficulty 

 of reading, and therefore the useless expenditure of time and 

 mental, or at least memorial, labour by one-half. I must not 

 pursue this subject further, though otherwise I might point 

 out many other economies which might be readily effected 

 upon the same grounds ; for there is yet the second heavy load 

 to be mentioned, which is laid upon the British, and upon 

 them alone, in the earliest and most irksome of the labours 

 of childhood. This load is our mediaeval system of Weights and 

 Measures, in which there are but two items upon which we can 

 look with satisfaction, one, the enactment that a Gallon must 

 contain exactly 10 pounds of water at a given temperature, and 

 the other, Gunter's chain of 100 links. We have two different 

 Pounds, and three different Ounces ; the binary system of 

 avoirdupois, suitable enough to an elementary condition of 

 commerce and cultivation, is broken by the inexplicable introduc- 

 tion of an arbitrary 7 ; and the areas which have been 

 scientifically measured by the chain are forthwith thrown into the 

 chaos of Roods and Perches. 



