1880.] 54:0 ICattell. 



press the sounds not already provided for. In his letter to 

 Miss Stevenson, 17(58, written in the reformed spelling and 

 with the new characters, he disposes in his plain common 

 sense way of the objections urged against the new depar- 

 ture, including the very ones most frequently advanced now. 

 But the great man, who handled the lightning with such 

 success, failed hopelessly in his encounter with the English 

 spelling ; and in his letter to Mrs. Mecum, 1786, he sorrow- 

 fully admits that " what is still called the bad spelling in 

 English is really the best, as generally conforming to the 

 sound of the letters and of the words ;" he also quotes, with 

 undisguised admiration, the conundrum of Mrs. Brown's 

 housemaid, " if yf don't spell wife, what does it spell ?" and 

 then abandoning all further efforts "to propagate useful 

 knowledge " in this direction, he suddenly disappears as a 

 spelling reformer. 



The great astronomer, David Rittenhousc, Franklin's suc- 

 cessor as President of this Society, was too much occu- 

 pied with the heavenly bodies to care much about what 

 was going on upon the earth, but his successor, Thomas 

 Jefferson, had a personal and practical interest in this 

 matter. He had >to write many messages to Congress. 

 This led him to a more thorough study of the language 

 through which these important communications were made 

 to his fellow-citizens. I am not sure that Jefferson was, 

 technically speaking, a spelling reformer. Having under- • 

 taken to reform the old Federal party, he probably found 

 his hands full, and declined any more contracts in that line; 

 but a sentence near the close of his celebrated essay upon 

 the Anglo-Saxon language, written in 1708, is pleasant read- 

 ing for the spelling Reformers now ; says he, "to express the 

 sounds of a language perfectly, every letter of its alphabet 



