204 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol,. II., No. 2S. 



of authorities ; for the element of personal 

 knowledge is entirely wanting. Nor has the 

 compihition the value it might have had if 

 authorities had been quoted. Although the 

 book is apparently- bj- a New-Englander, he 

 omits the limestones of Smithfield, R.I., and 

 the serpentines of Lj-nnfield, Mass.,- — both 

 interesting, though, as yet, little-used stones. 

 Anj- personal knowledge of the subject would 

 have supplied a host of such facts, which are 

 not to be found in books, though well known 

 to geologists. The same absence of personal 

 knowledge leads to such misleading statements 

 as that the fossils around Prague are identical 

 with those of the same age iu Scandinavia, 

 Russia, Great Britain, and North America. 

 "While the book is padded with thirty-eight 

 pages on classification of fossils, nothing is 

 given to the arts of quarrying or of dressing 

 stones, — ■ most important and most relevant 

 matters. 



The chromolithographic plates are fairly 

 well done : the_y fail to give the peculiar effect 

 of depth or translucency, which is beyond this 

 art, but which. is the greatest charm of the 

 finest decorative stones. 



The style is not altogether bad, though it is 

 frequentl}' inverted ; and the author often gets 

 into the subject verj- much as John Phoenix 

 ' backed the transit ' into the plane of the 

 meridian. Now and then it is strikingly epi- 

 grammatic, as in the following phrase : ' One 

 of the caprices of nature is to anticipate the 

 works of art.' 



It is a pity that so much faithful labor 

 should have been given to this work. The 

 printing of the book, and the index, are very 

 satisfactory. Despite its defects, the book 

 will have a certain value to those interested in 

 the subject ; for, as a compilation, it is, iu its 

 way, remarkable. 



A PRIMER OF VISIBLE SPEECH. 



Vifible-.ipeech reader fnr the nursery and primary 

 school. By Alex. Melville Bell, F.E I S., 

 etc. Cambridge, Klny, 1883. 4 -f- 52 p. 16°. 



The science of phonetics made, perhaps, its 

 greatest advance through Bell's Visible speech, 

 though it has hy no means remained stationary 

 since that book appeared. It is this system 

 which this primer seeks to bring into practical 

 use in teaching, and its alphabet is a great 

 improvement over that which we now use. It 

 cannot be said, however, that the phonetic 

 analysis on which it is based has received 

 in all respects the approval of phoneticians. 

 With some changes, the vowel system has now 



won wide acceptance, but the anal3''si3 of con- 

 sonants has met with serious objections ; for 

 instance, for such sounds as /, th, s, s/t, in 

 English. A discussion of the system itself 

 would necessitate reference to recent work 

 on plionetics, especially to Sweet's paper on 

 Sound notation in the Transactions of the phil- 

 ological society for 1880-81, and to Sievers's 

 Grundziige der phonetik, and such a discus- 

 sion would hardly be in place here. Oue ma^' 

 wish, however, that some of Sweet's clianges 

 of the Visible-speech alphabet could have been 

 adopted. Still, the imperfections of the sys- 

 tem might never attract a child's notice, and 

 he would probablj- accept unquestioningh' the 

 signs given for/ and th, without understand- 

 ing why they were made to' resemble the sign 

 for I. For the scientific study of living lan- 

 guages, and of the phenomena of linguistic 

 change, some such phonetic system as Visible 

 speech, we may hope, will be agreed upon, at 

 least provisionally', whether it is found of prac- 

 tical value in teaching- children to read or not. 

 The test of practice must show whether this 

 ingenious alphabet will do better than other 

 phonetic primers the work of teaching a child 

 to read ordinaiy printed books. The primer 

 is divided into three parts, — first, pictured 

 words, containing pictures of a few common 

 objects, with their names and some phrases ; 

 next, sentences in rhA'thmical form ; and lastly, 

 a vocabulary of common words arranged ac- 

 cording to the initial sound, beginning with 

 labial consonants, and ending with vowels. 

 All this is printed 01113- i" Visible-speech letters. 

 These three parts are preceded bj- some direc- 

 tions to the teacher ; and at the end a key is 

 added for the teacher's use, containing the 

 usual forms in Roman type of all the w-ords in 

 the primer. Exclusive of the kej-, the whole 

 contains thirty-five pages. At the beginning 

 of the key are given a few 'notes,' which 

 speak of the syllabic I and n, as in castle, lis- 

 ten, and of the glides, that is, the vowel van- 

 ishes, or final diphthongal elements in such 

 words as 7ie«?- (the sound represented bj-r), 

 day, go. It must surprise an American stu- 

 dent of phonetics to see that American pronun- 

 ciation is credited by Mr. Bell with pure long 

 vowels ill the last two of these words, instead 

 of with diphthongs, especially if his own expe- 

 rience and observation with foreign languages 

 have shown him how hard it is for most Ameri- 

 cans to learn the pure long sounds of e and o as 

 pronounced on the continent of Europe. Pos- 

 siblj' the American vanishing vowel in these 

 cases is less prominent than in England, and 

 it maj- be that some Americans do pronounce 



