THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 65 
GRADATION IN VOWEL SOUNDS. 
head before the Phitlological Section. 
BY J. W. CONNOR, B. A. 
When I accepted your Secretary’s invitation to contribute a 
paper to one of your meetings I hoped to be able to command 
enough spare time to prepare something worthy of your attention. 
In this I have been disappointed, as well as of the hope 
of attending your meeting in person and not only profiting 
by your discussion of my paper but of being cheered by personal 
contact with men interested in the same great and humanizing 
study. This latter disappointment has forced me to write on a subject 
that I had not-at first chosen, one however requiring less in the way 
of oral and black-board illustration. ‘These remarks are offered in 
excuse for the elementary nature of the subject on which I am 
writing, a subject, however, which is somewhat akin to one discussed 
in one of your last year’s meetings and one which at least affords 
another illustration of the fact that a principle in science is often 
found to lie at the root of phenomena, apparently most unconnected. 
Perhaps, therefore, those to whom much or all of what I shall be 
able to adduce is familiar, may feel some satisfaction in seeing 
phenomena so apparently isolated as the Teutonic ablaut, the 
Sanskrit guna, the Sanskrit ‘Stamm abstufung’ and the irregular- 
ities of Latin and Greek declension and of certain Homeric forms 
all explained by the one great principle of gradation. 
It would be a waste of time to describe to your section the 
immense impetus given to philology by the study of Sanskrit 
grammar, or to point eut how later researches into the relations of 
vowel sounds have been hampered by a lurking disposition to lock 
upon Sanskrit as showing in all essential points the primitive Indo- 
European type. Yet after all, this was in kind though not in degree 
much the same error as that which excites Prof. Skeat’s wrath, the 
deriving of English words from High German. For no one dialect, 
no matter how early its records, can present in ail respects the 
