Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/208

Among other observations which escape the ordinary rules of assimilation or weakening are those lately studied in the book of Meringer and Meyer on Faults of Speech, in the shape of metatheses, contaminations, articulations, etc., one class of which consists in the interchange of consonants by shifting them from the syllables to which they belong to others, so that the displaced consonant takes the position of the one that has displaced it. Such steps taking place in an idiom without literature or education are as contagious as the others. It is in this way that the root spek, which gives the Latin spectare and the Sanskrit spak, is in Greek σκεπ, whence (σκέπτομαυ, σκοπός, σκοπέω), and in French the Latin scintilla, which should make échintelle, has given étincelle. The vocal image has been reversed.

In the laboratory of experimental linguistics which has been instituted in this college, these phenomena of phonetics will be subjected to a scientific study, the articulations of individuals will be examined at the moment they are made in the mouth; and by means of the instruments of Edison and Marey we shall be able to write the sounds, or rather they will write themselves, so that they will offer to the minute and protracted observation of the eye what the ear necessarily perceived in a confused and fugitive way; and thus a whole order of research and discovery is opened to linguists, however little taste they may have for physics and the natural sciences.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.

 

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In a book recently brought to light, De Naturis Rerum, or Concerning the Nature of Things, by one Neckham, who was some time in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century a professor in the University of Paris, the game of chess is treated entirely as a military diversion. The actions of the several pieces are compared to the military deeds of the heroes of old or to strategical devices in war. There are other evidences that it was played in Europe ordinarily or chiefly by soldiers. Among them is the presence of the chess rook (castle) in the coats of arms of twenty-six English families. It was discouraged by ecclesiastics about Neckham's time as a vanity and source of quarrels. One council, in fact, went so far as to order clerks excommunicated who indulged in it. For the same reasons John Huss is said to have deplored that he ever learned it. Neckham's account of the game includes a story of Louis the Fat, of France, who. when fleeing from Henry I, of England, killed a soldier who had caught his horse by the reins, saying that the king could never be taken, even in chess; and tells of several sanguinary feuds, with the loss of many lives, being occasioned by Reginald Fitz Ayman slaying a nobleman in Charlemagne's palace with a chessman. Neckham's book is a very curious one, covering most of the lore of his time, and treats of poetry, biblical criticism, astronomy, popular myths, birds, fishes, the structure of the earth, trees, compasses, fountains, animals, and many other subjects.