recitation,
that will not yield when time and distance have relegated his college
friendships, with his lost youth, to the Eden or the Avilion of memory.
And if afterwards he comes, with Emerson, to find the chief value of his
college training in the ability it has given him to recognize its little
avail, he will thus disparage it only in the spirit in which a more
advanced student of an earlier day, looking back upon the stupendous
revelations of his "Principia," likened them to so many pebbles or
shells picked up on the shore of the illimitable ocean of knowledge.

ORTHOGRAPHIC REFORM

Seldom have controversies brought out so much humor, on both sides, as
that over the reform of English spelling, and few have excited so little
interest in proportion to the energy expended. Both these results are
due perhaps to the fact that the subject, from its very nature, does not
admit of being made a burning question. Yet one has to look only a
little way into it to see that important interests--educational,
commercial, and possibly racial--are involved. Thus far the champions
have been chiefly the newspapers for spelling as it is, and scholars and
educators for spelling as it ought to be. But, in spite of the
intelligence of the disputants, the discussion has been singularly
insular and deficient in perspective. It would gain greatly in
conclusiveness if spelling and its modifications were considered broadly
and historically, not as peculiar to English, but as common to all
languages, and involving common problems, which we are not the first to
grapple with, but rather seem destined to be the last to solve.

As is usually the case in controversies, the chief obstacle to agreement
is a lack of what the lawyers call a meeting of minds. The two sides are
not talking about the same thing. The reformer has one idea of what
spelling is; the public has another idea, which is so different that it
robs the reformer's arguments of nearly all their force. The two ideas
for which the same word is used are hardly more alike than mother of
pearl and mother of vinegar. To the philologist spelling is the
application of an alphabet to the words of a language, and an alphabet
is merely a system of visible signs adapted to translate to the eye the
sounds which make up the speech of the people. To the public spelling is
part and parcel of the English language, and to tamper with it is to lay
violent hands on the sacred ark of English lit