affection he engaged by the sweetness of his disposition, and his holy principles of action; and they carefully and tenderly nursed him in his illness. On the last night of his life he awoke from a short sleep, and said to one who was sitting by him, "Where's your mother?" This lady was called; she softly approached his bed-side, and, lifting towards her his dying eyes, William faintly said, "Jesus is waiting for me!"-and expired.

A. P.

THE BLIND AND THE DEAF.

AN erroneous opinion prevails that blindness is a greater affliction than deafness. This would unquestionably be true, if privation of sight precluded the acquisition of language, which it does not; nor, as ample experience shows, does it oppose any very serious obstacle to the full development of the mental powers. We are all familiar with many well-authenticated instances of blind persons having attained to a distinguished position both in literature and science. The celebrated Saunderson, who filled the chair of Newton in the University of Cambridge, lost his very eye-balls by the small-pox when only twelve months old; yet, before he was thirty, we find him giving public lectures on optics, explaining clearly the theory of vision, and discoursing admirably on the phenomena of light and colours-thus furnishing, by his own extensive acquirements, a convincing proof of the extraordinary powers of language, and of the full efficiency of the ear as an avenue to the mind. The darkness of the blind, as such instances as this sufficiently show, is but a physical darkness; they still possess a ready channel through which the brightest beams of intellectual light may be freely poured; but the darkness of the deaf-mute is a mental and a moral darkness; and though he can gaze abroad upon creation, yet it is little more than mere animal gratification that he feels; he looks not "through nature up to nature's God," nor does he participate in that high communion which, through the sublimity of her visible language, she holds with the soul of an enlightened being.

The reason why the blind usually receive from us a deeper sympathy than the deaf, is, perhaps, because the amount of privation borne by the former can be more accurately estimated. We have

only to close our eyes, to shut out for a while the glorious light of heaven, in order to conceive how great that privation must be. But we can never, for a moment, occupy the place of the uneducated deaf and dumb; we cannot shut out our moral and intellectual light; we cannot dispossess our minds of all that language has conveyed there, nor realize, by any effort of imagination, the melancholy condition of a being grown up in the midst of society, yet deprived of all power of social intercourse, whose mind has never been elevated by a single act of devotion, nor soothed and comforted by a single impulse of religious feeling. Man naturally "looketh on the outward appearance;" and when we see the bright eye, and the contented and even joyous aspect of the deaf-mute, we forget that we may witness all this in "the brutes that perish.'

It may probably be thought by some, that in thus depicting the mental and moral condition of the deaf and dumb, we are drawing upon imagination, and magnifying their affliction, and that we altogether overlook the value of signs, the peculiar language of the deaf-mute, as a medium of communication. But it is not so. Of the importance of signs we are fully sensible, and readily admit their immense advantage, in the absence of a more perfect channel, in imparting to the deaf a knowledge of written language; yet, as used by the uneducated deaf and dumb, gesticulations, as every teacher knows, is of extremely limited scope, barely sufficing to make known his mere physical wants and animal emotions, and to describe, though with much vagueness and ambiguity, events, or rather actions, which may have passed before his own eyes, or in which he may himself have engaged.

Now, it is important to bear in mind that all this melancholy amount of privation arises, not from want of hearing, but from the want of ordinary language— a want which no system of mere gesticulations can ever supply; and therefore that, in estimating the condition of the deaf, we must not overlook the fact, that those who come under this designation divide themselves into two distinct classes, separated from one another by a wide and essential difference-a difference which may, indeed, be narrowed by artificial aid and human contrivance, but which, in ordinary circumstances, can never be wholly obliterated.-North British Review.

NEW MODE OF WRITING AND PRINTING.

THOUGH numerous and most important improvements have taken place in almost every department of literature and science, one main feature appears to have been altogether overlooked. The most casual observer cannot fail to have noticed the incorrectness and deficiency of our present orthographic system. Every child, as it rises into life, finds a difficulty in it, and every foreigner who has paid any attention to the language of this country can tell of the inconsistencies he encountered, and it will appear to all who examine the question that the words of the German student were literally correct, that the rules for writing English are all exceptions.

Professor Rapp says: 66 Although the French is become the common language, in a diplomatic and social sense, it has never acquired a firm footing in extensive regions beyond Europe. The English, on the other hand, may pass for the universal language out of Europe, and, by its bold fusion, and consequent decomposition of the forms of its Gothic and Roman elements, this idiom has acquired an incomparable fluency, and appears especially destined by nature, more than any one of the living, to undertake that part." This is high praise to the English tongue, coming, as it does, from a foreigner, to whom scarcely any written language, either living or dead, is unknown. But," he adds, 66 were not the impediment of an antiquated, absurd orthography in the way, the universality would be still more apparent, and it may, perhaps, be said to be fortunate for us other Europeans that the Englishman has not yet made the discovery.'

But it is not necessary to proceed far for illustrations, it will be sufficient if the reader calls to mind the period in which he learned to read and to spell. How many days, weeks, and even months of continued labour did these accomplishments cost, how wearisome and monotonous was the employment to himself, and equally tedious and unsatisfactory must it have been to his teacher. Were it not, indeed, for the prodigious advantages afforded by the power of reading when obtained, few would have sufficient courage to commence the task, and fewer still to carry it on till it was consummated. If, however, we wish to see its difficulty to a man in the prime of bodily and intellectual vigour, we need only

refer him to the foreigner in his study of the language, for he then possesses every advantage which can be enjoyed. He is thwarted at every step; he is supplied with a rule at one moment, and as soon as he attempts to see its application, he finds it is incorrect. He discovers, at one period, that words which are written in a similar manner are accented differ ently, as, - pre'sent, present'; re'fuse,. refuse'; absent, absent'; com/pound, compound'; wind, and wind; wound, (an injury,) and wound, (part of the verb to wind.) Then, on the other hand, he finds words spelt differently and pronounced in the same manner, as: no, know; threw, through; right, rite, wright, write; mete, meat, meet; bear, bare; signet, cygnet; hock, hough; sew, so, sow; e'er, heir, ere, air, and eyre. The dictionaries will furnish numberless other examples; in some cases the words being derived from the same origin, others barely traceable to obscure analogies, and others apparently derived from different roots. These are difficulties which we encountered, though they may now be forgotten, and yet it was only after years off practice that we obtained the proficiency we enjoy. Still the labour was only proportioned to the task, for when it is recollected that out of the fifty thousand words of the language, only about fifty, or one in a thousand, are written as they are pronounced, the magnitude of the work is apparent. But can we safely say, after all our advantages, that we are always perfectly correct? If a trial were made of our capacity, perhaps it would not be as great as we imagine it to be. Let a scientific work be examined, containing many new words, derived from different sources, and when they are Englished after the present fashion, their originators would hardly recognise them. But thus it is with many words in common life. What mere landsman guesses that boatswain is pronounced "bosun," coxswain, COCsun," studding-sail, "stunsel." These may be considered as extreme cases, but this is only because our particular avocations have not led us to their use, or to hearing them uttered. But it must be remembered, the foreigner and the child are in the same predicament with respect to all the words in the English language. The following fact will show the actual difficulty. A child at Ipswich came, in the course of reading, to the word cause, and not being able to pronounce it, he commenced spelling it, thinking, no doubt,

66

like many others, that the spelling would lead him to the sound, and on pronouncing the letters c, a, u, s, e, immediately said, “Say you see!" which was in accordance with the spelling. On being told that the au should be sounded awe, he said, "Then it must be saucy." His mother smiled, and said, "No, my dear, it is not called saucy,-the first c should be pronounced like k," on which he called it kausee. Still wrong and bewildered, his instructor was then obliged to tell him that the letter s should be pronounced like z, on which he immediately said, "It must be kauzy." The mother then was obliged to tell him the whole truth, namely, that the first letter c should be sounded like k, the letters au like awe, the letter s like 2, and the letter e not at all, and that the letters c, a, u, s, e, which really gave the sound say you see, was pronounced cause. Here are difficulties for a child to overcome! The spelling, in fact, is no guide to the sound, nor the sound to the spelling. Let but any one read a few lines, and pronounce every letter as it is placed, and he will recognise but little resemblance to his mother tongue. Mr. J. Pitman mentioned at a lecture, that during four years he had had opportunities of examining the spelling of several hundreds of names of persons, and had only found three whose spelling agreed with the sound,these were Mr. Bolt, Mr. Ford, and Mr. Peto. When the word h, o, w, has an s prefixed to it, the pronunciation is altered to show, and a foreigner, when learning the language, would naturally expect that it would retain the same sound of sho, wherever it occurred, but he finds that if the letters er are added, it undergoes another change, adds another burden to his memory, thus-shower. On being told that d, e, a, r, is pronounced dear, he would naturally think that b, e, a, r should be pronounced similarly, beer. Pig is spelt p, i, g,-add the letters e, o, n, and the letter g is changed, as, pigeon. 'T, o, m is Tom-by adding the letter b, thus, tomb, the sound of the o is changed, and the added letter is silent.

Suppose a student of the language, unacquainted with the customary mode of spelling, wished to spell the word softly. He would perhaps say, "There are six sounds in this word,-s, awe, f, t, l, e. From the word psalm I shall take ps, as the representative of the sounds; I shall indicate the second sound awe by ough, because I find this combination used for the

same purpose in the word sought. The third sound f I shall express by ph, because I find this combination used for the sound in phonography. To represent the sound t, I shall take the letters th, because in the word Thomas the same sound is thus expressed. The fifth sound, I shall express by this letter; and the last sound e by eigh, because I find these letters used to express the same sounds in the words Leigh, Hadleigh." Putting these letters together, we have Psoughphthleigh to represent the word softly. This is scarcely worse than writing the pronunciation we give in the words cough, through, and phthisic. We usually suppose that the twenty-six letters of the alphabet are sufficient to represent the true number of simple sounds in our language. But when they are examined, it is found that out of this small number three are useless. Q is represented by ku, so that it is, in fact, a compound sound, instead of having a simple primitive signification; x is fully represented by the letters k and s, and the two powers of c are found in s or k, for which of the two it may stand. When c is pronounced as a letter, it has a sharper sound than the s; but when compounded with other letters, as it always is, the distinction is imperceptible. The twenty-three letters that remain are altogether unable to perform the work required, as will be apparent on consideration, for the different forms used to distinguish them are almost innumerable. The letter a, instead of being uniform in its meaning, is differently pronounced in the following words: many, paring, want, father, fat, fall, dollar; besides which the a is expressed by different letters, as-ah, psalm, aunt, clerk, heart, and guard. Z has nine different representations, as is apparent in the words sacrifice, sacrificing, as, ease, scissors, Xenophon, zeal, and freeze. Nor are these letters more abused than the generality of the others, for we find that e is found in fifteen different forms, u in twenty, o in seventeen, i in sixteen, and t in twelve. The total number of forms in which the sounds indicated by the letters of the alphabet are expressed by using different compounds, is 379!*

If the word "scissors " be taken, or, as it is sounded, "sizurz," the methods of spelling will be found to be almost innumerable. S may be expressed in nine different ways, i in eighteen, ≈ in nine, u

For copious illustrations of this, see, "A Plea for Phonotypy," by Mr. A. J. Ellis.