224 



SCIENCE, 



[Vol. XV. No. 374 



^€es lower; and at the same time the air supplied to a theatre, 

 hall, or church must have a temperature of from 60" to 80°. 

 Hence the impossibility of meeting all requirements of both heat- 

 ing and ventilation with air from one supply source at a fixed 

 temperature. S. H. Woodbridge. 



Boston, March 20. 



Sound-English. 



In your review of my ' ' Sound- English, a Language for the 

 "World," |in your issue of March 31, you make some statements 

 to which, I am sure, your well-known fairness will allow me to 

 offer a correction. 



You say that I propose ' ' to introduce at first five new letters, 

 to be followed by six more at a later time," and that you 

 ■< ' gravely doubt if any system can be brought into use that con- 

 tains new letters ; and, if new letters are to be intoroduced, there 

 are other systems that have quite as good a claim to be adopted ' ' 

 as mine. 



Now, the fact is that I do not introduce a single new letter. I 

 ■distinctly state it as my idea of the ' ' requirements of a phonetic 

 alphabet ' ' (see p. 31) that ' ' the present equipment of any print- 

 ing-office must suffice, without the necessity of casting new types 

 >or even employing diacritical marks, ' ' and that ' ' all the lead- 

 ing type-writers now in use must be adapted or easily adaptable 

 to the new system without destroying their usefulness in writing 

 the present spelling. ' ' My whole system is worked out in con- 

 formity with this principle. It is the principal claim I make 

 for its superiority over other systems. If you will kindly turn 

 to the ' ' specimen page ' ' from Macaulay' s ' ' History, " on p. 51, 

 you will not find a single sign which could not be set up to-day 

 in any village newspaper-office between Maine and Calfoniia. 



To disting-uish a in at from a in ask, I propose a slight altera- 

 tion in the type, which may be effected, with a penknife; but 

 "this is a trifling matter, so much the more as we do not require 

 amy distinction between the two sounds in ordinary reading-mat- 

 ter. 



I do not know of any perfectly phonetic system of spelling in 

 which the same result is attained, if we except IVfr. Ellis's 

 * ' Glossic ; ' ' but, then, he employs vowel digTaphs, while I do 

 not emjiloy a single vowel digraph, exceiDting, of course, the 

 three regular diphthongal sounds ou, oi, and ai (in aisle) . 



I do propose five very simple alterations for the script; and I 

 ^ay, further, that in course of time, when ' ' Sound-English ' ' 

 will be firmly established, type-founders will provide us with 



more appropriate forms to designate some of the sounds; and 

 then, merely for the purpose of offering a complete system, I 

 venture to suggest what these forms ought to be. But I am far 

 from advocating their immediate introduction. 



As for the expediency of designating the long vowels by full- 

 faced type, and in script by shading, it is, of course, a matter of 

 opinion. You think it an insurmountable obstacle ; for, as you 

 say, ' ■ who will take the trouble, in rapid writing, to shade now 

 and then a letter more heavily than the rest?" Now, in the 

 first place, ' ' the rest ' ' are not shaded at all in my system. In 

 the second place, do not many systems of stenography distinguish 

 sonant from surd consonants by shading? And do not stenog- 

 raphers write rapidly ? 



In conclusion, I beg to call attention to the fact that I employ 

 full-faced type and shading not only for the long vowels, but 

 also for designating the accent, — a feature which I think to be 

 as important as it is original ; for I do not know of any system 

 of spelling, in any language, in which the accent is thus desig- 

 nated, symbolically, without employing a special sign. 



I hope you will not consider this as a fault-finding review of 

 your review, coming from an author who cannot bear adverse 

 criticism. It is intended only as a courteous I'equest for permis- 

 sion to lay my own statement of the facts before the select circle 

 of thinkers who subscribe for your excellent journal. 



A. Knoflach. 



New York, March 88. 



Do the Barclayan Descriptive Terms occasion Obscurity? 



In the American Naturalist for October, 1889, p. 923, the notice 

 of Stowell's cranial nerve studies concludes with the remark 

 that "the adoption of the Wilderian adjectives and adverbs 

 renders them somewhat pedantic and obscuie." The title of this 

 communication attributes to Barclay, the anatomical preceptor 

 of Richard Owen, the exact descriptive terms which have been 

 employed by many writers, and which I merely adopted in 1880 

 at the Boston meeting of the American Association for the Ad- 

 vancement of Science. The charge of pedantry is not new ; but, 

 as that is a matter of custom and taste, it may be overlooked. 

 Since, however, the very purpose of the Barclayan toponymy was 

 to eliminate the obscurity which lurks in every anatomical treatise 

 or paper known to me in which those or equally exact desci'ip- 

 tive terms are not used, I am anxious for specifications on this 

 head, and trust they may be presented in response to this letter. 



BuBT G. Wilder. 



Ithaca, N.Y., March 39. 



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