58 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CAICADIAN INSTITUTE. 



2. Annual Report of the Curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 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), hush (short) ; inote, morality (or m,aux, 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 ai 

 of air, 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 

 of a 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 



