48 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XL No. 260 



made up until actually sold to passengers, which would oblige 

 sleepy passengers either to sit up during transit through that intel- 

 ligent commonwealth, or else sleep with entire indifference to the 

 dusky porter and the possible new-comer, and sundry joint opera- 

 tions not, as most of us know, over-conducive to balmy and seduc- 

 tive repose. 



What, then, we really require is not a new law, or a new custom, 

 or a new statute, but an infallible foresight and judgment. Our 

 newspaper leader-writers are not, unfortunately, the only gentlemen 

 in the country who can prophesy things after they come to pass. 

 There are plenty of gentlemen, equally competent in that regard, 

 now employed upon the railway lines of this continent. If, how- 

 ever, a gentleman could be found with the much rarer gift of 

 prophecy as to things to come before they actually transpire, I im- 

 agine that it would be difficult to name a salary he could not com- 

 mand from a railway company. Indeed, neglect by a railway com- 

 pany to secure the services of such advance prophet ought certainly 

 to be such a negligence as would settle the company's liability 

 ■entirely beyond all possible legal inference. There is nothing upon 

 which newspaper comment is more familiar than the well-worn 

 theme of the fallibility of human testimony : even four inspired 

 Evangelists, they tell us, could not agree upon a given state of 

 facts. They press this fallibility against railroad companies. Do 

 they ever press it in their favor .' That the average newspaper 

 should experience a difficulty in conceiving that every railway acci- 

 dent was beyond the company's control does not amaze me ; but I 

 admit to some surprise at the following criticism upon my paper, in 

 \S\e. Railroad Gazette, a most valuable and intelligent commentator, 

 usually, upon railway affairs : viz., " At Republic, he [myself] says 

 the man sent with a red light failed to carry it ; no mention is made 

 of the fact that two men failed in their duty to send him. Con- 

 -cerning Forest Hill, Mr. Morgan makes the original assertion that 

 no appliance in the company's power to provide was lacking ; 

 which, perhaps, must be admitted as true, as a competent bridge- 

 engineer (which the company neglected to provide) could not be 

 ■called an ' appliance.' " So far from exploding, this appears to me 

 a much stronger putting of my point than I was equal to on the 

 facts as they reached me. According to the Gazette, the fault at 

 Republic was not that the one red-light man did not go ahead, but 

 that two officials did not send him. So, not one human brain, but 

 two, failed to do their duty. If, as I argued, a corporation cannot 

 control the deflections of even one human brain, how can it control 

 the deflections, independent and coincident, of two? The fact that 

 one man was absent-minded, I held to be beyond the power of a 

 corporation to prevent. But the utterly unprecedented coincidence 

 of two brains at the same moment, in the same spot, and under the 

 same circumstances, forgetting their duty, — and that duty their 

 identical duty to do identically the same thing, — does really seem 

 to me to be about as nearly an absolute act of God as any case of 

 which most experts could conceive. And, again, supposing that 

 the inspector of bridges of the Boston and Providence Railroad 

 was incompetent : here, again, a human brain was at fault. If it 

 can be shown that the Boston and Providence Company knew him 

 to be incompetent, or had discharged a competent bridge-inspector 

 to deliberately install an incompetent one, that would have been an- 

 other matter. But it does not so appear, neither does it appear that 

 any bridge inspected by this particular bridge-engineer had previous- 

 ly fallen. Speaking of this unfortunate bridge-engineer of the Bos- 

 ton and Providence Railway Company, the Massachusetts Board 

 of Railway Commissioners says, " This man had been in the em- 

 ployment of the corporation for a long series of years, his trade was 

 that of a machinist, he had not been educated as a civil engineer, 

 ■and the management had abundant reason to know that he was not 

 qualified, and had had no opportunity to qualify himself, to do the 

 work assigned to him with reference to this bridge." Ergo, had 

 he been discharged prior to the accident, the accident would not 

 have happened. Perhaps not. If a railway company could only 

 foresee accidents, could know in advance just exactly when one of 

 its bridges was going to collapse, doubtless it could avert the dis- 

 aster by discharging the bridge-inspector, so that he could not re- 

 port that bridge secure, so that no train would try to cross it (which 

 would resemble, indeed, the intrepid mariner who warded off a 

 cyclone by collaring the barometer and holding it upside down). 



But, seriously, should our railway companies every now and then 

 discharge their old, tried, and faithful employees — men " who had 

 been in the employment of the corporation for a long series of 

 years " — lest they should at some time or other in the future be- 

 come unfortunate, unfaithful, or careless .•' Perhaps a man not 

 " educated as a civil engineer " could not possibly, after having been 

 "in the employment of the corporation for a long series of years," 

 come to know as much about railway-bridges as if in his youth he 

 had spent a couple of years with a tutor, or in a polytechnic college. 

 Does not the Railroad Gazette's statement of the causes of the 

 Forest Hill accident exactly carry out my own criticism ; namely, 

 that a human brain, trusted and unusually accurate, for once failed 

 to do its work ? Appleton Morgan. 



New York, Jan. 12. 



The Pronunciation of 'Arkansas.' 



J. Owen Dorsey's article in Science for Jan. 13, re-opening the 

 question of the pronunciation of ' Arkansas,' necessitates a few 

 words in reply. 



I fear that Mr. Dorsey fails to catch the spirit of my plea for 

 the local and historically correct pronunciation, when he dwells 

 upon the various vowel-sounds of a, and accuses me of pleading 

 for 'consistency' in the pronunciation of this most inconsistent 

 Anglo-American language of ours. Such an act upon my part 

 would certainly be in opposition to my favorite hobby of observing 

 and collecting data upon the differentiation in orthography, pro- 

 nunciation, and vocabulary, under climatic and industrial condi- 

 tions, of the English language in the United States. 



The broadening of a into a-d), the Indian origin, and the euphony 

 of the word to foreign ears, are questions of the least import in the 

 pronunciation of the word ' Arkansas ; ' for the first of these is 

 probably French-Indian or a secondary climatic change visible in 

 hundreds of other words, such as ' Wabash,' ' Ouachita,' ' Wau- 

 kesh(Z,' etc., and which neither Mr. Dorsey nor I, nor any one else, 

 can stop, more than we could put a brake upon any other evolu- 

 tionary biologic or linguistic process. The evil effect that would 

 follow the use of individual choice in the euphonious pronunciation 

 of geographic terms is self-evident ; and, since these Indians had no 

 phonetic method of recording their tribal names, we must seek the 

 appro.ximately correct pronunciation of the word ' Arkansas ' in the 

 French language, in which it was first phonetically recorded. 

 Surely, Mr. Dorsey cannot find there any authority for the pronun- 

 ciation of the final syllable ' saas,' or omission of the final s. 

 Certainly none of the examples given by him would authorize this, 

 nor any of the following historical methods of spelling the word, 

 which Mr. Dorsey seems to have overlooked: Joliet (1672), 

 ' Kansa ; ' Hennepin's map (Utrecht, 1697), ' A Kansa ; ' Dumont de 

 Montigny's map (1753), ' Arcangas ; ' Le Page du Pratz (1758), 

 ' Arcancas ; ' and many other later French writers, ' Arkansas ; ' all 

 of which, in good French, can only be pronounced ' Arkansa.' I 

 think no further examples are necessary to show that the original 

 French pronunciation was much nearer '-sa' or '-saw' than 

 ' saas.' 



But this is only one, and the least, of the many reasons why the 

 local pronunciation should be preserved. The present territory of the 

 State of Arkansas was first settled by a colony of Frenchmen, sent 

 out by the celebrated financier, John Law, about the year 1720. 

 They settled in the country of the ' Arkansas ' Indians at Arcansas 

 Post, around which their descendants have lived untilthe present 

 day, and which was the nucleus of all the early Anglo-American 

 migrations into Arkansas, and from whom they got their pronun- 

 ciation of the French geographic nomenclature. These people still 

 pronounce the word ' Arkan.fi? ' and ' Arkan.raw.' They can see 

 neither logic nor reason in ' Arkani'aa^.' Nor are they to be 

 blamed that they memorialized the Legislature of the State 

 through the Historical Society of Arkansas a few years since, when 

 exasperated by the attempts of foreign euphonists to force the 

 ' saas ' pronunciation upon them, and to ridicule the only historical 

 and phonetically correct pronunciation of the word, to set the mat- 

 ter at rest by legalizing the old pronunciation of the word, which 

 was done by an almost unanimous resolution of the State Senate. 



Have the customs and rights of the millions of Anglo-.'\.merican 

 and French-American pioneers and descendants in this region no 



