There are many other topics on which I should be pleased to say something, but I have already exceeded the limit that I had set for myself. I saw many things to interest me, and some to surprise. I brought back pleasant memories of kindnesses received, hundreds of useful hints, and a more open mind. I should have liked to bring back also some of America's beautiful buildings, a little of her spirit of liberality, a few of her superfluous dollars, her respect for teachers, and the deep faith in the value of education on which that respect is founded. DAVID SALMON

TRAINING College,

SWANSEA, WALES

V

IS SPELLING A LOST ART?

In the general chorus of praise which is annually chanted over American schools is there any note of exultation over the ability of American children to spell the English language? Some schools report that their own percentage of failure is comparatively small, but even these schools take only a qualified pride in their achievement. Prominent school-men, while maintaining that there has latterly been some improvement, generally confess that there is, on the whole, no subject less successfully taught.

From time to time the public is aroused on the matter. Twenty years or more ago, when the attention of the American people was naturally directed upon the earlier days of the Republic, the old-fashioned spelling-match won new popularity. At this remarkable form of entertainment the interest centered chiefly upon two surviving contestants, who struggled for a time with the deceitfulness of obscure syllables only to fall at last before the assault of some unexpected antagonist. The performance seems almost grotesque when we stop to think of it. That men of high intelligence should be able to spell only a fraction of the words in their native tongue seems almost too strange to be credible. Yet such is the undeniable fact. Few writers send their manuscript to the printer without a lurking dread lest some misspelled word may be overlooked in the revision of the proof.

Very respectable authority tells us that ability to spell is a gift of the gods, and that he whom the gods have neglected must make the best of his lot. Unfortunately, the Pharisee who can spell is tempted to view with scornful eye his neighbor, however penitent, who misplaces his vowels and consonants. I have known an excellent teacher of science who lost her position because a word or two in a mass of writing on a blackboard contained some letters out of place. Nemesis

appeared in due time, when her censor, an exceedingly brilliant woman, misspelled several words in writing an important testimonial.

Yet, after all, what especial virtue is there in being able to arrange the letters of words in a certain order? That order has never been universally accepted thruout the English-speaking world, and it has changed from century to century. To this day some spellings that pass for good in America are regarded in England as very bad indeed. Moreover, when compared with the eleven or twelve centuries in which English has been preserved in written form, the few generations during which a tolerable uniformity has been observed by the printers and to a less extent by educated people, appear very short. In fact, the printers and proof-readers and the teachers of spelling are almost the only classes that have permanently succeeded in their task. Certainly false is the assertion that, while good spelling may not mark the scholar, bad spelling marks the ignorant man." An ignorant man will usually spell badly, but many men who are never quite sure of their spelling are unjustly ranked among the ignorant.

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We must admit, then, that there has never been a time when correct" spelling was a universal accomplishment—even in the days of the Webster Spelling book. How is it now? The overwhelming majority of school children leave school after five or six years of training. A small percentage of the pupils less than two per cent. in some cities-enter the high school, and a picked few go to college. Whoever has had much to do with college themes and examination books can give a doleful list of the forms new and strange that the commonest words assume under the hands of some students. What then can be expected of the less favored majority whose schooling ends with the grammar school? No method yet devised has succeeded in making perfect more than a small percentage of the pupils in our public schools. To one blessed with a tender orthographical conscience this state of things must appear shameful if there is any easy way of preventing it; and even now those who would fain see in unimpeachable orthography one of the marks of a gentleman regard the in

ability of so many of their countrymen to spell as no laughing

matter.

Nevertheless, there is some excuse for even the worst of spellers, and there is much question whether the social position of many excellent gentlemen should on this score be made precarious. A man whose chief claim to distinction is that he can spell is a poor creature. His spelling faculty is at best but a form of memory, and that of no high order. A good speller is able to visualize words and to reproduce them as he has seen them, or to retain mechanically the order of letters in words that he has only heard. But the visual image of a word is, of course, nothing like the sound of it; and if the sound of the word does not inevitably suggest its proper form, the word is not likely to be written correctly. Hence, the proper form must be held in mind by sheer memory or by rules which not one man in ten thousand knows. But hosts of people whose perceptive powers in general are very keen have nevertheless a feeble memory for word-forms, and they naturally make a mess of their spelling. On the other hand, accurate images of words can exist quite independently of a proper realization of the pronunciation. One of the best spellers I have ever known was a German who could pronounce scarcely a single word correctly.

This is not the place for a technical discussion, and hence I cannot here show in detail why our spelling is so absurdly bad as it is. No one in his sober senses would deliberately sit down to invent such a system of spelling as ours, with its multitude of silent letters and obscure sounds. How then did it come to us?

Poor spellers now and then sigh for the times long ago, when spelling went more according to individual taste. They even hint that George Washington and other revered patriots showed their independence quite as much in their spelling as in other things. The older days were certainly far less censorious than our own in such matters. Yet a little study of sixteenth-century books will discover only minor variations from the norm of our own time-the difference appearing chiefly in the final e. To arrive at their golden age of free

dom they must go back to the centuries before the invention of printing. After the Norman Conquest the extensive borrowing of French words by widely divergent English dialects, and the partial respelling of English words by French copyists, led to great confusion. But even at worst the forms gave some clew to the pronunciation.

Our present spelling owes its absurdities largely to two opposing forces: the one, the resistless tendency of the language to change its sounds, particularly vowel sounds; the other, the conservative habit of using the old symbols or forms of words, even tho the sounds have changed. We are inclined to make merry over the spelling of five hundred or a thousand years ago, but, on the whole, it was far more consistent than our own. Old English—that is, Anglo-Saxon-spelling, and that of several subsequent centuries, was in the main phonetic, and the symbols, tho varied, appear for the most part to have indicated the desired sounds. At all events, no such chasm as now exists separated the word from its sound. We are now trying with essentially the same combinations of letters as were in use in the time of Queen Elizabeth, to represent sounds that have greatly changed since her day. Moreover, the changes have not been consistent, and they have tended more and more to make "correct" spelling and pronunciation difficult. This process of phonetic change is still going on, and it promises a goodly number of surprises in the next generation or two. The changes in America seem to be taking a somewhat different direction from those in England, and thus tend still further to complicate the problem of learning to spell.

In the face of these facts, what is to be done? The spellingreformers have a ready and apparently conclusive answer. "Strike," they say, "at the root of the difficulty; put our spelling on a purely phonetic basis, and remove once for all the absurdities that disfigure every page of printed or written English." If the scheme were practicable, it would doubtless be the most rational thing to do. But the progress of the reformers, eminent scholars tho they are, has been lamentably slow. At all events, an entire generation is likely to be born and educated before such a reform is generally adopted. The