58 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 
2, Annual Report of the Curator of the Museum of Comparative Zodlogy at: 
Harvard College for 1883-84. 
3. Science, Vol. IV., No. 96, for December 5th, 1884. 
4. Transactions of the Manchester Geological Society, Vol. XVIII., Part II., 
Session 1884-’85. 
The minutes of last meeting were read and confirmed. 
Mr. J. F. Brown, B.A., and Mr. Martin Luther Rouse were 
elected members of the Institute. 
Mr. Martin L. Rouse read a paper “On the Number, Na- 
ture and Musical Character of Vowel Sounds.” 
Premising that no complete classification of the simple vowel 
sounds in existence had ever been made, he drew especial notice to 
the omissions and the anomalies of Walker, Webster, Pitman and 
Nuttall. Then, by drawing analogies between the pronunciation of 
English words and comparisons between their utterance and that of 
French, German and Italian ones, he constructed a table of sixteen 
true vowels, eight long and eight correlatively short (indicating by 
examples which of them occurred in the four chief tongues of western 
Europe)—the vowels heard in the English and French words, boom 
(long), bush (short); mote, morality (or maux, mot) ; dawn, don ; 
path (or pate), patte ; bur, but ; age, edge; su, suspendre ; keen, kin. 
He further resolved six diphthongs used in the four languages into: 
components enumerated in his table ; and, departing from all previous 
traditions, he gave a place among the diphthongs to the a of care or a 
of ar, while he found this diphthong to be unique in possessing a 
short correlative—the a of carry or at. Being now enabled to test 
the comparative richness of the languages in vowel sounds, whether 
simple or compound, he did so not only by counting up the examples in 
the table itself but by marking from the table every first occurrence 
ofa sound in choice passages of English, French and German poetry 
(Italian being completely shut out of the competition by the table). 
The result was greatly in favour of the German ; but that language, 
on the other hand, was shown to be disfigured by oft-recurring 
gutturals, as was not the case with English, the least monotonous of 
the remaining three. 
The speaker then announced that he had completed a. discovery of 
which only isolated fragments had hitherto been made—of music in 
the vowels —the eight long simple sounds that he had discriminated | 
making up two perfect musical scales: the one when whispered, the 
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