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NATURE 



\_Feb. 26, 1880 



be almost as unintelligible to him as an Australian jargon, 

 in spite of the fact that our vocabulary and grammar 

 differ but slightly from his. But a familiar word sounds 

 strangely when its pronunciation is altered ever so little, 

 and when the outward form of a whole group of words is 

 thus changed, the most skilled philologist would find 

 himself at fault. 



Can anything, therefore, be more absurd than an 

 endeavour to mummify an extinct phase of pronunciation, 

 especially when the mummy-shroud was at its best but 

 a rude and inadequate covering which pourtrayed but 

 faintly and distantly the features of the corpse beneath ? 

 English spelling has become a mere series of arbitrary 

 enigmas, an enshrinement of the wild guesses and ety- 

 mologies of a pre-scientific age and the hap-hazard 

 caprice of ignorant printers. It is good for little else 

 but to disguise our language, to hinder education, and to 

 suggest false etymologies. We spell, we know not why, 

 except that it is so ordained in dictionaries. When 

 Voltaire was told that a-g-u-e was pronounced ague, and 

 p-l-a-g-u-e plague, he said he wished the ague would take 

 one-half the English language and the plague the other 

 half; but the fault lay not with the English language, 

 but with English spelling. 



Ignorance is the cause of our bad spelling as it is the 

 cause of most of the mischiefs which afflict the world. 

 The brief sketch of the history of writing we have been 

 studying to-night has shown us the goal at which writing 

 should aim, the end in which the labours of previous 

 generations should find their fulfilment. Writing should 

 represent clearly, tersely, and as nearly as possible the 

 individual sounds of words, and unless it does this it has 

 not advanced much beyond those infantile stages of 

 growth through which we have watched it struggling to 

 pass. The principal sounds of a language should each 

 have a special symbol set apart to denote them, and each 

 symbol should denote one sound, and one sound only. 

 We ought never to hesitate for a moment over the pro- 

 nunciation of a proper name or a word we have never 

 heard pronounced. Until we have an alphabet which 

 fulfils these conditions, our system of writing is still 

 imperfect and misleading, and our civilisation on this 

 side is less advanced than that of the ancient Hindus. 

 We may well envy the rude races of the Pacific or 

 Southern America, for whom the missionaries have 

 provided adequate and rational alphabets in which to 

 write their first essays in literature. An alphabet which 

 allows us to express the sound of e in thirteen different 

 ways, which has no special symbols for such common 

 sounds as th in then or a in man, and yet possesses otiose 

 and needless letters like c and x is unworthy of its name, 

 and still more of being the final result of all that toil and 

 thought which first worked out the Phoenician alphabet 

 and then fitted it to express the idioms of Athens and 

 Rome. We are sometimes told that to reform our 

 alphabet would destroy the etymologies of our words. 

 Ignorance, again, is the cause of so rash a statement. 

 The science of etymology deals with sounds, not with 

 letters, and no true etymology is possible where we 

 do not know the exact way in which words are pro- 

 nounced. The whole science of comparative philology 

 is based on the assumption that the ancient Hindus 

 and Greeks and Romans and Goths spelt pretty nearly 

 as they pronounced, in other words were the happy 

 possessors of real alphabets. It lies with ourselves 

 to determine whether we, too, shall be equally happy. 

 The spread of education which we are witnessing, and the 

 general interest taken in it, afford an exceptionally favour- 

 able opportunity for breaking the yoke of bondage in 

 which the printers have kept us. If our board-schools 

 are to be tied down to the particular mode of spelling 

 advocated by Walker or some other maker of unscientific 

 dictionaries, the opportunity will have been lost, and the 

 yoke of bondage will be bound more tightly round the 



necks of our children than it is even round our own. I 

 know the practical difficulties that lie in the way of reform, 

 but I know also that they are not insurmountable. Too 

 often the difficulty is but an excuse for our own lazy 

 disinclination to go to school again and learn to read 

 English in a new way. Hut it is not by laziness, by 

 shrinking from trouble and exertion, that England has 

 gained the place it now holds among the nations of 

 the world, and the value of a thing is measured by the 

 labour it demands to achieve it. After all, the introduc- 

 tion of a new alphabet is not much to ask for. It is no 

 more than was asked for and obtained by the old Phoe- 

 nicians of the Delta, by the Greeks, by the Komans, nay, 

 by our own ancestors also. And many of them, too, had 

 to give up their cherished idols before they could accept 

 it ; I fancy it must have cost the Anglo-Saxon cutter of 

 runes as hard a struggle to adopt the new-fangled alpha- 

 bet of the Roman missionaries as it may cost some of us 

 to give up the alphabet of the printers for one which 

 would fitly express our own splendid inheritance of speech. 

 But let there be no mistake upon the matter ; it is not a 

 reformed spelling, as is often erroneously and injudiciously 

 said, but a reformed alphabet that is required. We can- 

 not work to good purpose with imperfect and worn-out 

 instruments. High farming needs steam-ploughs, and 

 not the primitive instrument of the Egyptian peasant. If 

 the history of writing has taught us anything, it is that 

 writing is perfectible, and that what was done in old days 

 by those whose civilisation we are apt to consider inferior 

 to our own can be done also by ourselves. 



NOTES 

 At the anniversary meeting of the Geological Society 011 

 Friday the Wolla-ton medal was assigned to M. A. Daubree, of 

 Paris, and the Wollaston fund to Mr. Thomas Davis, of the 

 British Museum. The Murchison medal and fund were pre- 

 sented to Mr. R. Etheridge, F.R.S., Paleontologist to Her 

 Majesty's Geological Survey and the School of Mines ; theLyell 

 medal to Mr. J. Evans, LL.D., F.R.S. ; and the Lyell fund to 

 Prof. Qnenstedt, of Tubingen, on whose behalf it was ackmw- 

 ledged by Prof. H. G. Seeley, F.R.S. 



M. Herve-Mangon has been appointed director of the Paris 

 Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, in succession to General 

 Morin. 



MM. Antoine Breguet, ; on of the celebrated member of the 

 Institute, and Richet have taken the joint direction of the Revue 

 Scientifique, the largest and most influential French scientific 

 I eriodical. M. Antoine Breguet will write more specially on 

 physics, and M. Richet on chemistry. It is understood that M. 

 Alglave, the former editor, has resigned in order to devote him- 

 self more entirely to the propagation of Spencerism and Monism. 

 M. LCEWY, sub-director of the Observatory of Paris, is coi> 

 ducting very delicate researches for determining the different 

 flexions arising from the weight of meridian instruments when 

 they are pointed in any other position than the zenith. The 

 study of these small differences is conducted on a new principle 

 invented by M. Lcewy. A biconcave lens has been placed in 

 the central part of the instrument, and arranged so that an 

 image of the spider-thread can be placed in coincidence with the 

 threads in a certain position. In moving the instrument the 

 coincidence is destroyed, and can be re-established by the micro- 

 meter. The image of the threads can be seen (1) with the eye- 

 piece reflected on the edges of the lens illuminated through the 

 axis by a lamp placed as usual, (2) by the anterior part of the 

 lens illuminated by a lamp placed in front of the eyepiece, (3) 

 by a reflection on the object-glass. The sensibility of ihe pro- 

 cess is so extraordinary that a difference was found when a 

 weight of ten kilogs. was suspended at each end of the mstru- 



