Ill 



pronunciation, and he was so fascinated by the novelty and extent of 

 the subject that he determined to devote himself to its study ; and 

 it occupied him, more or less, all the remainder of his life. It resulted 

 in a great work, of which the First Part appeared in 1869. It was 

 entitled : ' On Early English Pronunciation, with special reference to 

 Shakespeare and Chaucer, containing an Investigation of the Corre- 

 spondence of Writing with Speech in England, from the Anglo-Saxon 

 Period to the existing Received and Dialectal Forms,' &c., &c. 



This part was, in a few years, followed by three others, but 

 Part V required so much labour, that it was only finished in 

 1889. The whole work contains about 2500 pages, and was published 

 jointly by the Philological, the Chaucer, and the Early English Text 

 Societies. The Public Orator at Cambridge, speaking of it in 1890, 

 said, very appropriately : 



" It may be confidently predicted that the day will come when all 

 the varieties of our dialects, like the ancient languages of the 

 Arcadians and the Cyprians, will have entirely faded out of human 

 cognizance ; and then most certainly there will daily accrue increas- 

 ing honour to the works which this author has elaborated with such 

 infinite labour." 



Mr. Ellis was President of the Philological Society from 1872 to 

 1874, and from 1880 to 1882, and he wrote many other works and 

 papers on this and other kindred matters. 



Another subject in which Mr. Ellis took great interest was the 

 scientific theory of music. During his phonetic investigations, he 

 had wished to obtain an accurate physical explanation of the produc- 

 tion of vowel sounds, and, on the suggestion of Professor Max Miiller, 

 he referred for this to the work published in 1863 by Professor 

 Helmholtz, " Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen.'' In this, he 

 found much more than he had sought for. He had studied music 

 under Professor Donaldson, of Edinburgh (a physicist as well as a 

 musician), and had acquired a desire to investigate for himself the 

 physical basis of the musical art. He had found but poor satisfac- 

 tion in the existing theoretical works, but the novel expositions of 

 Helmholtz solved all his difficulties. 



The first results of his study were three papers presented to the 

 Royal Society in 1864, " On the Conditions, Extent, and Realization 

 of a Perfect Musical Scale on Instruments with Fixed Tones," "On 

 the Physical Constitution and Relations of Musical Chords," and 

 " On the Temperament of Musical Instruments with Fixed Tones." 

 But he had so high an opinion of the importance of Helmholtz's 

 work that he undertook the laborious task of translating it into 

 English, and the translation was published in 1875, under the title 

 of " The Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory 

 of Music." 



