i 9 4 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Among other observations which escape the ordinary rules of 

 assimilation or weakening are those lately studied in the book of 

 Meringer and Meyer on Faults of Speech, in the shape of metathe- 

 ses, contaminations, articulations, etc., one class of which consists 

 in the interchange of consonants by shifting them from the syllables 

 to which they belong to others, so that the displaced consonant 

 takes the position of the one that has displaced it. Such steps tak- 

 ing place in an idiom without literature or education are as con- 

 tagious as the others. It is in this way that the root spelt, which 

 gives the Latin spedare and the Sanskrit spalc, is in Greek o-K7r, 

 whence a-Kejrrofjuu, ovcoiros, ctko7T0)), and in French the Latin scin- 

 tilla, which should make echintelle, has given etincelle. The vocal 

 image has been reversed. 



In the laboratory of experimental linguistics which has been 

 instituted in this college, these phenomena of phonetics will be sub- 

 jected to a scientific study, the articulations of individuals will be ex- 

 amined at the moment they are made in the mouth; and by means of 

 the instruments of Edison and Marey we shall be able to write the 

 sounds, or rather they will write themselves, so that they will offer to 

 the minute and protracted observation of the eye what the ear neces- 

 sarily perceived in a confused and fugitive way; and thus a whole 

 order of research and discovery is opened to linguists, however little 

 taste they may have for physics and the natural sciences. Trans- 

 lated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique. 



In a book recently brought to light. Be Naturis Rerum, or Concerning 

 the Nature of Things, by one Neckham, who was some time in the late 

 twelfth or early thirteenth century a professor in the University of Paris, 

 the game of chess is treated entirely as a military diversion. The actions 

 of the several pieces are compared to the military deeds of the heroes of 

 old or to strategical devices in war. There are other evidences that it was 

 played in Europe ordinarily or chiefly by soldiers. Among them is the 

 presence of the chess rook (castle) in the coats of arms of twenty-six Eng- 

 lish families. It was discouraged by ecclesiastics about Neckham's time as 

 a vanity and source of quarrels. One council, in fact, went so far as to 

 order clerks excommunicated who indulged in it. For the same reasons 

 John Huss is said to have deplored that he ever learned it. Neckham's 

 account of the game includes a story of Louis the Fat, of France, who. when 

 fleeing from Henry I, of England, killed a soldier who had caught his 

 horse by the reins, saying that the king could never be taken, even in chess; 

 and tells of several sanguinary feuds, with the loss of many lives, being 

 occasioned by Reginald Fitz Ayman slaying a nobleman in Charlemagne's 

 palace with a chessman. Neckham's book is a very curious one, covering 

 most of the lore of his time, and treats of poetry, biblical criticism, astron- 

 omy, popular myths, birds, fishes, the structure of the earth, trees, compasses, 

 fountains, animals, and many other subjects. 



