TO THE READER. THIS treatise is not a mere collection of trivial remarks or of the usual views on Human Speech, considered either as a vehicle of intercourse between men or as a key to unlock the literary treasures of a specific language with. It is analogous to a treatise on Navigation or on Architecture or on Materia Medica; each one being taken with reference to the whole cycle of the respective sciences, of which it is composed. As each of those treatises is, as it were, a sort of nosegay or bouquet of flowers, culled from the several beds of their scientific gardens: so is the present book intended to be a kind of brain-, ears- and eyes-gay, gathered from the psychologic, anatomic acoustic, graphic, grammatic, lexiconic, ethnographic, etc., beds of the garden of Anthropology. May it not prove to be a brain-, ear- and eye-sore to any body. The mode of treatment of the subject will be found peculiar. The poet's "laudatur ab his culpatur ab illis" will be practised on it, with the verbosity of our age; according to the intellectual, moral and æsthetic character of each reader. Blame, unless it be unjust, will be less disagreeable than thoughtless praise. The writer pleads guilty to great compression of style. But had he expanded his material in the customary manner, the book would be, at least, three times more bulky, consequently more costly, and would require more time for perusal. Only minds unaccustomed to masticate the food, offered to them in the infinite realm of creation, will find the style obscure in some parts. Our almost innumer |