mill pool, there to shoot about in the transparent chalk-water after the hapless chub, with the grace of a very Naiad.

Then he begins to examine into the question of its articulating powers; and soon wishes that able editors and correspondents possessed a little more of that minute philosophy which consists in using their own eyes and ears accurately and patiently for five minutes. He hears the beast, when told to say mamma, give a double bark, which sounds very like that word; and when told to say papa, give exactly the same bark. Whereon, being corrected, he repeats it, beginning, as was to be expected, with that mother of all consonants, which may be, according as the imagination chooses to lead the ear, m, b, p, or v. He remarks also that the seal, when excited, begins to repeat the same bark on his own account, and is silenced by a rap on the head, and a Don't talk, sir!' from his showman, who of course has a natural dislike that the public should fancy the talking to be a product of nature and not of education. After which he departs, having gained at least one fact-that the primary consonant, in mammals at least, is produced by suddenly opening the just closed lips, and driving the breath out forcibly; easy and natural to a seal, whose lips are very thick, and can join very tightly, to keep out the water. But whether the consonant be b or m, he can tell no more than in the case of the sheep, who says ma-a and ba-a alternately and accidentally; or of the dog, who says bow if he begins his bark with lips closed, and wow if with the lips open in the centre. After which deep cogitations he begins to see more clearly why mamma, papa, and baba, are the first words which all children pronounce; and to consign to the kingdom of Galimatias Herodotus' story of the goat-fed children, who astonished the king of Egypt (searcher for the primeval language), by crying Beccos,' which in Syrian means bread.' That they began with a 'b,' he doubts not; that they proceeded to a k,' and finished with an 's,' unless by overmuch sucking of their poor goat

nurse they had made their dear little tongues too large for their mouths, he doubts much.

But all this helps him not one step toward the question, How does my child get beyond ma-ma, and pa-pa? How does he learn to form those endless combinations of lips, teeth, and tongue, which produce the various consonants? How to modulate the chords and pipe of that most wonderful of all instruments, the human throat (in which all instruments which have been made by clumsy man are at once combined and excelled), so as to produce the endless variety of tones by which he expresses each and every passing emotion? reads the admirable chapters in Mr. Hunt's book, v., vi., and vii. He reads all other books which one can find; and confesses with David,

He

I am fearfully and wonderfully made, oh Lord; and that my soul knoweth right well.' That-but beyond that, nothing. Is the child conscious of the different motions of his lips, and does he make them deliberately, as causes intended to produce certain effects? Impossible. I am not conscious of them in myself. Only very slowly, and by careful self-inspection, do I become aware of the motions of my mouth in forming some few of the simpler consonants. As for the compound ones-str, for instance-full consciousness about them is impossible.

It would take hours of careful labour before a looking-glass to determine the respective motions which produce p, b. and m. When has the child had either time or intellect to perform such a process for himself? He is not like the pianist, in whom from long practice the conscious use of the fingers has past into unconsciousness. He is a musician playing the most difficult of all music at sight-and on an instrument, strange to say, which he has never seen. For that he learns, as some deaf and dumb people do, by watching the motion of his parents' lips, I can hardly believe. He watches their eyes, and not their mouths; and if he did watch, all that he could see would be the vowels and the labials; dentals and linguals would be hidden from him. Add to this the curious fact (known

1859.]

ages ago to the cunning old Brahmins), that most of the consonants can be (and are by most people) formed in two different ways at different times-viz., sometimes on the lips, and sometimes on the teeth. Add again the fact that very few people except the most highly bred women or practised public speakers, use their lips freely, fully, and correctly; and the hypothesis of a conscious imitation, by successive acts of will, becomes impossible; and one is forced to confess the whole process of speech to be utterly transcendental and inexplicable, lying in that region below consciousness-in which, after all, lie all the noblest and most precious powers of our humanity.

And so the minute philosopher leaves the whole question, with fresh respect for the little boy who once posed a certain lord mayor.

For the lord mayor having asked him from his throne of office, 'My boy, are you aware of the nature of an oath and the little boy having answered, Is that anything good to eat?' his lordship thought proper to examine him in his knowledge of the principles of religion; and first, of course, in his notions concerning that flaming Tartarus which is held by some to be the first principle of religion, limiting and conditioning all others, even to our conceptions of Deity itself.

So the lord mayor asked, with a solemn and even pious countenance, My little boy, do you know where bad people go when they die ?'

To which that little boy answered with a knowing wink (whether by special instigation of the devil or of another spirit)

'No, I don't know; nor you don't know. Nobody don't know that.' After which the lord mayor said

no more.

That little boy's answer I have occasion to give to most matters, the more I consider them; and especially to this present one of how Master Tommy speaks.

Now, if there be, as far as the child's consciousness is concerned, no rationale of speech, there may be all the more easily an irrationale thereof-in plain English, a stammer; so easily, indeed, that one wonders, after examining the process of arti

3

culation, why all the world does not stammer, sooner or later, more or less; and confesses that Nature takes better care of us than we can of ourselves, and that

There's a Divinity doth shape our 'words,'

Rough-hew them as we will.

For the child, when speaking (if we will consider), is like a man walking along the right road; but in the dark. Or like, again, a man managing a delicate machine, of whose construction he knows nothing, save that, to keep it going, he must move a certain handle. But let the man get out of his road, even by a single yard, he can probably never find it again; and all his wanderings to and fro lead him only further from the right path. Or let the machine get out of order in the least, the man who works it by rote becomes helpless. The more he turns his handle, the greater the disturbance becomes; and if he attempts ignorantly to set the machinery right, he breaks or confuses it utterly.

Even so, let the child's vocal organs once lose the habit of pronouncing certain syllables, and they are utterly 'at sea' thenceforth. They have been doing right they knew not how, and the child knew not; and they have no more knowledge of how to do right again than the man in the dark has of getting back into the path. They must struggle and try, they know not what methods, in aimless agitation and contortion. The child's will and reflection cannot help them, for he simply knows nothing about the matter. They used to imitate others of their own accord, and now they have forgotten-what he never remembered. Nay, his will and reflection, when he tries consciously to pronounce the t or b, which has become suddenly impossible, only make the matter worse; for as he becomes agitated and terrified with the sudden sense of impotence, his own horror (for he does feel a real and most painful horror) confuses alike mind and body, and he is as incapable of commanding his thoughts or actions, as a drunkard or a madman. He has lost the road which he never knew. Poor wretch, how shall he find it again?

And how does he lose it?

A puzzling question, when we know that in three cases out of four, stammering may be traced to imitation, conscious or unconscious. That the children and brothers of stammerers are more liable than other people, is well known; and many a sad case may be traced to intentional mimicry. I knew of a young man who used, for his little brothers and sisters' amusement, to act some stammering relation. One day he found that his acting had become grim earnest. He had set up a bad habit, and he was enslaved by it.

He was utterly terrified; he looked on his sudden stammers (by a not absurd moral sequence) as a judgment from God for mocking an afflicted person; and suffered great misery of mind, till he was cured by a friend of mine, to whom I shall have occasion to refer hereafter.

Often, again, the imitation is quite unconscious, and the child learns to stammer as he does to speak. If it be asked why the example of the thousand (or rather 2500, for that is about the average in England) who speak plain does not counteract that of the one who does not, the answer is, that it does counteract it, except in those very rare cases where there is some occult predisposition. One of the most frightful stammers I ever knew began at seven years old, and could only be traced to the child's having watched the contortions of a stammering lawyer in a court of justice. But the child had a brain at once excited and weakened by a brain fever, and was of a painfully nervous temperament. And yet and here is another puzzle-that fact did not make it necessary, or even probable, that he should stammer. One may see every day persons who by all rules ought to stammer, with weak jaws, upper teeth lapping over the under, flaccid diaphragms, the habit of talking with closed teeth, of pouring out their words rapidly, of breathing irregularly, speaking with empty lung, even (what seemingly would make a stammer certain) of speaking during inspiration as well as during expiration, who do not even hesitate. Verily, Nature is kind.

A clever little book, called The Unspeakable; or, the Adventures of a Stammerer (a book, by the bye, which should be in the hands of every parent who has a stammering child), sets forth a normal case of this kind.

A lonely, motherless, excitable boy is thrown into circumstances which excite and terrify him, and then packed off to school in company with a man whom he has every reason to fear and hate, and whose face and manner have been in the last four days painfully impressed on his imagination. This man is a frightful stammerer. On the journey he insults and strikes the poor boy, who revenges himself by mimicking his contortions. Arrived at school, he suddenly finds himself unable to pronounce his own name, and begins to be a stammerer. The schoolmaster, a brutal inan, who has been prejudiced against him, accuses him of doing it on purpose. If you hesitate, sir,' says he, with such a pun as that stamp of man loves, 'I shall not; and the poor boy is half cut in two with a cane on the spot. The habit is irremediably confirmed thenceforth.

And here I say boldly, that the stupidity and cruelty with which stammering children are too often treated, is enough to rouse one's indignation. They are told you can help it if you like.' As if they knew how to help it-as if the very people who speak thus could tell them how to help it. They are asked, 'why cannot you speak like other people? As if it were not torture enough to them already to see other people speaking as they cannot; to see the rest of the world walking smoothly along a road which they cannot find, and are laughed at for not finding; while those who walk so proudly along it cannot tell them how they keep on it. They are even told 'you do it on purpose." As if any one was dumb on purpose.

You think it fine.' As if they were not writhing with shame every time they open their months. All this begets in the stammerer a habit of secresy, of feeling himself cut off from his kindred; of brooding over his own thoughts, of faneying himself under a mysterious curse, which sometimes (as I have known it do) tempts