PREFACE

TO THE SECOND EDITION.

MORE than six years ago I offered the manuscript of the following work to the then principal bookseller of this city. Engagements which promised to be more lucrative obliged him to decline the publication. The result has shown, that with his instrumentalities of trade he might have made a profitable sale of it; especially as, with my motives in authorship, I would have freely given the whole right of the edition to him. I made no second offer of the manuscript to any other; for as it had been rejected by the foremost publishing patron of American works, I deprecated the influence of his example against me. Thus the first step of my authorship was unfortunate; and as in these days of anxious benevolence, a very few misfortunes are sure to bring down contempt,-to save further ill luck, I printed it myself: and subsequently found an individual not unwilling to interest himself in disposing of it.

I remember one of the objections to publishing the 'Philosophy of the Human Voice' was its not being suited lo this country. I know well that the higher views of science and taste, and all originality in an individual, as being the minimum of a minority, where nothing is undertaken but through numbers and linked opinions,—are considered as con

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trary to the popular spirit of our institutions: yet upon this very belief I offered that work to the public; hoping by the diffusion of its principles, in due season to suit the country to it; and thus instead of being a present time server, on full but precarious wages, to endeavour to be the unhired server of an enlightened and grateful futurity.

With here and there an exception, the scoffers at this work have been those eternal enemies of improvement,-the Placemen of Learning. Supposing however that, through the influence of knowledge made light and popular and cheap, the arts are not now so far downward as to create despair of any successful efforts by a new one, before their intire decay and future revival, I would say to many of those who hold the places and draw the profits of science, that if they will but continue to sheathe their opposition in their feigned contempt, the first humble apostles of this work may, by a gradual rise to those places and profits, see their own enlarged designs of instruction, in the course of half a century completed.

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There are now several teachers and numerous friends of the system throughout the United States. Dr. Barber, an English physician, who had devoted himself to the study of elocution, and who came to Philadelphia about the period of the publication of the Philosophy of the human voice,' was the first to adopt its principles, and to defend them against the double operations of doubt and sneer, by an explanatory and illustrative course of lectures. Yale College, at New Haven, was early favorable to the system. But the University of Cambridge, by the appointment of Dr. Barber to its department of Elocution, was the first chartered institution of science that gave an influential and responsible approbation of the work.

This work furnishes, upon analysis, a system of principles for an art that heretofore has been waywardly directed by individual instinct or caprice: all therefore who design to teach

the art of reading must sooner or later adopt it.

Will the in

If this city

fluential instructors of Philadelphia be the last? were not the place of my birth and residence, I would take upon me to answer-No.

The objections first made to the Philosophy of the human voice' were against its utility; now the cry among the learned is, that it is too difficult. Too difficult! Why, all new things are difficult; and if the scholastic pretender knows not this, let the annals of the trades instruct him. -Just one century has elapsed since that common material of furnituremahogany, was first known in England. It is recorded that Dr. Gibbons, an eminent physician of that period, had a brother, a West India captain, who took over to London some planks of this wood, as ballast. The Doctor was then building a house; and his brother thought they might be of service to him. But the carpenters finding the wood too hard for their tools, it was laid aside for a time as useless. Soon after a candle-box being wanted in his family, Dr. Gibbons requested his cabinet maker to use some of this plank which laid in his garden. The cabinet maker also complained that it was too hard. The Doctor told him he must get stronger tools. When however, by successful means, the box was made, the Doctor ordered a bureau of the same material; the colour and polish of which were so remarkable, that he invited all his friends to view it. Among them was the Duchess of Buckingham, who being struck with its beauty, obtained some of the wood: of which a like piece of furniture was immediately made for Her Grace. Under this influence the fame of mahogany was at once established; its manufacture was then found to be in nowise difficult; and its employment for both use and ornament has since become universal.

The master-builders of science, literature and eloquence, declared the Philosophy of the human voice' to be too hard

INTRODUCTION.

THE analysis of the human voice, contained in the following essay, was undertaken some years ago, exclusively as a subject of physiological inquiry. Upon the discovery of some essential functions of speech, I was induced to pursue the investigation; and subsequently to attempt a methodical description of all the vocal phenomena, with a view to bring the subject within the limits of science, and thereby to assist the purposes of oratorical instruction.

By every scheme of the cyclopædia, the description of the voice is classed among the duties of the physiologist; yet he has strangely neglected his part, by borrowing the small substance of his knowledge from the fancies of rhetoricians, and the dull authority of grammarians. It is time at last for physiology, of right and seriously, to take up its task.

In entering on this inquiry, I determined to avoid an express reference to the productions of former writers, until the influence of nature over the ear should be so far established, as to obviate the danger of adopting unquestioned errors, which the strongest effort of independence often finds it so difficult to avoid. Even a faint recollection of school instruction was not without its forbidding interference, with my first endeavour to discover, by the ear alone, the hidden processes of speech.

After obtaining an outline of the work of nature in the voice,. sufficient to enable me to avail myself of the useful truths of other observers, and to guard against their mistakes, I consulted all accessible treatises on the subject, particularly the