ad of reaching for the pencil, they immediately close
and clap or stick, refusing to act. Your hand is unable to pick up the
pencil. That, then, is similar to stammering. The hand is doing
practically what the vocal organs do when the stammerer attempts to
speak and fails. But, on the other hand, if, when the message was
received by your thumb and finger, it made short, successive attempts
to pick up the pencil, but failed to accomplish it, then you could
compare that failure to the uncontrolled repetitions of stuttering.
This inability to control the action of the thumb and forefinger would
be the result of a lack of co-ordination between the brain and the
muscles of the hand, while stuttering or stammering is the result of a
lack of co-ordination between the brain and the muscles of speech.

WHAT CAUSES LACK OF CO-ORDINATION: But even after it is known that
stuttering and stammering are caused by a lack of co-ordination between
the brain and the organs of speech, still, the mind of scientific and
inquiring trend must ask, "What causes the lack of co-ordination?" And
that question is quite in order. It is plain that the lack of
co-ordination does not exist without a cause. What, then, is this cause?

An inquiry into the cause of the inco-ordination between brain and
speech-organs leads us to an examination of the original or basic
causes of stammering. These original or basic causes in their various
ramifications are almost as numerous as the cases of speech disorders
themselves, but they fall into a comparatively few well-defined classes.

These original causes in many cases do not appear to have been the
direct and immediate cause of the trouble, but rather a predisposing
cause or a cause which brought about a condition that later developed
into stuttering or stammering.

Let us set down a list of the more common of these causes, not with the
expectation of having the list complete but rather of giving facts
about the representative or more common Basic Predisposing Causes of
Stuttering and Stammering.

A little more than 96 per cent. of the causes of stammering which the
author has examined can be traced back to one of the five causes shown
below:

1--Mimicry or Imitation
2--Fright or severe nerve shock
3--Fall or injury of some sort
4--Heredity
5--Disease

Let us take up these familiar causes of stuttering or stammering in the
order in which we have set them down and learn something mo