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him to actual suicide; sometimes (as I have known it do) seems the possession of a demon. If it proceeded from an organic defect, a deformity, he could be patient. If he had a club-foot, he would know that he could not dance. If he was blind, he would not expect to see. But when he knows that there is no deformity, that his organs are just as perfect as other people's, the very seeming causelessness of the malady makes it utterly intolerable.

And when to this is added, not merely the mockery of his wanton schoolfellows, for in that there is no malice, and if it become too severe the stammerer can generally stop it by licking the offender (and stammerers, from the half maddened state in which they live, are swift and furious strikers, and, failing the first, will have recourse to other weapons, and effectually silence, as I have seen them, a big bully by the threat of putting a knife into his ribs), not merely, I say, the mockery of schoolfellows, but the stupid and unmanly cruelty of schoolmasters, they are indeed most miserable and hopeless, and will be so till the better method of education which the great Arnold inaugurated shall have expelled the last remnants of that brutal mediæval one, unknown to free Greece and Rome, but invented by monks cut off from all the softening influences of family, who looked on self-respect as a sin and on human nature as a foul and savage brute; and therefore, accustomed to self-torture and to self-contempt, thought it no sin to degrade and scourge_other people's innocent children. Let all parents and masters, therefore, bear in mind (unless they wish to confirm an incipient stammer) that the patient must be treated with especial kindness. He is almost certain to be of a sensitive and imaginative temperament; if so, he must not be excited or terrified. Otherwise (but these are the rarer cases) he is simply stupid: therefore he will require all the more patient attention. But he must not at the outset be made painfully conscious of his own stammer. To do that is to fix it on his imagination, and therefore, by some strange inner reaction, on his nerves of volition. The more

he expects to stammer the more he will do so; aye, he will foresee a long way off the very word which. he will not be able to pronounce this time, though the next time, perhaps, he will pronounce it easily. and till he has been taught how to speak (which not one in ten thousand can teach him), it is better to draw his attention away from the whole matter, keep him quiet, makehim speak slowly, and see if the evil habit will not die away naturally of itself by mere converse with those who speak aright, as do a hundred temporary tricks of voice and gesture in boys and girls. But if after a year or two the malady remains (and it will hardly remain without becoming worse), the only remedy is a scientific cure. Meanwhile, anything like fear of bodily punishment, or even capriciousness in his teacher's temper and rules, will surely confirm the bad habit. If he is uncertain of the consequences of his own acts; if he is tempted to concealment or falsehood by dread of pain; if he is by any means kept in a state of terror, shame, or even anxiety-then his stammer will grow worse and worse as he grows older, and whatever may have been the physical causes which produced it at first, there will be moral causes enough to extend misuse to every vocal organ in succession.

Of these primary physical causes, as might be expected, very little is known. Imitation cannot be the source of all stammering: some one must have stammered first for others. to imitate; but why he did so, and what the causes are which make certain lads more prone to imitate him than others, are quite obscure as yet. Excessive eagerness may be the primary cause of a breathstammer, and often is so in little children, who speak perfectly plain at other times; but what makes the abuse of the breath set up abuses of the jaw, tongue, and lips, and the stammer become confirmed, we know not. Colombat distinguishes well between the 'begaiement labiochoréique,' or stuttering, which makes a man repeat helplessly his 'b' or 't,' and is analogous to St. Vitus's dance in other organs, and the 'begaiement gutturo-tetanique? or stammering, which silences and

chokes a man utterly, setting the jaw, contracting his glottis, and (Colombat says, but I altogether doubt it) rendering the tongue also immovable. This frightful lockjaw be traces, as he does the chorea of the lips, to a want of harmony between the nervous influence and the muscles'-in fact to some physical weakness of the nerves. Rullier (Dict. des Sciences Médicales) goes further, and considers that the cause of the whole evil must be sought for in the brain; and there is much to be said on his side. All which weakens the brain increases a stammer on the spot, especially sexual excesses, and, most of all, that dark vice which is so fearfully common in schools. Wine, too, and anger, as all the world knows, cause a stammer, or at least a stutter, by creating a pressure of blood on the brain; and so in certain cases does paralysis. I know at this moment an old bedridden keeper, in whom a paralytic stroke is producing gradually as true a stammer of the lips and tongue as can be seen in any lad of ten. The clot formed at the base of the brain is, I suppose, pressing and crippling the nerves which supply the jaw and mouth. But beyond these few vague facts I fear we know nothing, and perhaps need not know. Weakness of some portion of the brain is not the cause of stammering, for it can be cured perfectly without meddling with the brain; except where the brain is so generally debilitated (and I have known it so), whether congenitally or by excesses, that the patient cannot give average attention or use average determination. Where there is (as one has had reason to fear in some cases) incipient softening of the base of the brain, nothing beyond alleviation is possible; but such cases, I believe, are all but unknown in children.

I have said that stammering can be cured; I say now that it must be cured. If the stammerer is worth calling a man; if he be anything better than terræ filius, an ox on an ass, his life will be one of great trial, even (if he be a clever, sensitive, ambitious person) of acute misery. If any one doubt this assertion, let them read and perpend

that book, The Unspeakable, which I just mentioned, and their eyes will be opened to a whole wilderness of mental troubles of which they never before dreamed. I have my own reasons for not entering into details; they are at once too painful and too ludicrous-and all the more painful often because they are so ludicrous-to talk over with every one and any one. But this I

say, that parents who now-a-days, when a certain and rational cure for stammering is known, let their children grow up uncured, are guilty of the most wanton cruelty. A stammerer's life is (unless he be a very clod) a life of misery, growing with his growth and deepening as his knowledge of life and his aspirations deepen. One comfort he has, truly-that the said life is not likely to be a long one.

Some readers mav smile at this assertion: let them think for themselves. How many old people have they ever heard stammer? I have known but two. One is a very slight case; the other a very severe one. He, a man of fortune, dragged on a painful and pitiable existence-nervous, decrepit, effeminate, asthmatic

kept alive by continual nursing. Had he been a labouring man, he would have died thirty years sooner than he did.

The cause is simple enough. Continual depression of spirits wears out body as well as mind. The lungs never acting rightly, never oxygenate the blood sufficiently. The vital energy (whatever that may be) continually directed to the organs of speech, and used up there in the miserable spasms of misarticulation, cannot feed the rest of the body; and the man too often becomes pale, thin, flaccid, with contracted chest and loose ribs and bad digestion. I have seen a stammering boy of twelve stunted, thin as a ghost, and with every sign of approaching consumption. I have seen that boy, a few months after being cured, upright, ruddy, stout, eating heartily, and beginning to grow faster than he had ever grown in his life. I never knew a single case of cure in which the health did not begin to improve there and then.

There were, however, till very

lately, great excuses for parents who left their children to grow up stammerers. The chances of cure were literally worse than none. So mysterious an affliction offered, of course, a noble harvest to quacks of all kinds-almost as great an harvest, indeed, as hysteria itself; and one half wonders why priestly exorcism, or at least mesmerism, has not ere now been offered as a cure. Perhaps our modern spiritrappers may tell the world yet a secret on the point from the other world; and the Emperor Napoleon or Sir E. B. Lytton set up as rivals to Mr. James Hunt.

Be that as it may, quackery enough, and to spare, has been brought to bear on stammering, proceeding in each case on the quack's method of partial induction of catching at one phenomenon, and legislating exclusively for that, careless whether it was a symptom or an exciting cause.

A

The first thing, of course, that quacks perceived, was that stammerers used the tongue in some wrong way or other; and hence all manner of tricks were played with the poor tongue, even by men like Itard, who were no quacks. He put a little metal bridge under the tongue, seemingly to steady it -which cost money, and was a complete failure, as it must have been. Intoning was tried, sometimes with success; and even, so ignorant were some of these empirics, talking with the teeth closed. New York lady, Mrs. Leigh, advised them to put their tongues against the top of their palates-a secret which both the Prussian and the Dutch governments rewarded by making its owners government professors. Apparently a nasal twang is not considered a defect in those countries. Mrs. Leigh, as a down-easter, would of course look on it as a national elegance. But her secret was known and practised in England years ago, and not without success at times, by an old man down south (who shall be nameless, as he is dead and buried). His method, as I have heard it described, was simple and original. He took his pupil home, demanded secresy and fifty pounds, entertained him (or otherwise) for a couple of

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days with filthy stories, and at last initiated him by a poke in the ribs, and Stick your tongue against the roof of your mouth, and breathe through your nose. That's the ticket.' By which advice, continued with reading in a chanting drawl, the pupil sometimes profited, and sometimes, again, did not. I knew certainly one case in which he was very successful, but he was helped in it by two circumstances; first, the stammer was never severe, or accompanied with spasm and con. tortion; and secondly, the patient was a man of extraordinary physical power, who spent, and spends, at least nine months of the year in the open air, hallooing to keepers, dogs, and horses. His tongue, and not his lung, was at fault: had he been a narrow-chested lad, condemned to a high stool and ledgers, a flaccid diaphragm, and bad digestion, the fate of his stammering might have been a very different one. Beside, this old worthy's plan of pinning the tongue to the roof of the mouth, like Mrs. Leigh's, is only to expel vice by vice. The tongue ought not to be pinned there, or anywhere else. It ought to float free, but quiet, on a level with the lower teeth; as it may be seen to do in any one whose articulation is clear and high-bred; and one ought not to be satisfied with-one ought not to believe in the general permanence of-any cure which does not restore fully the right use of the organs, and make the stammerer, who has a mouth (as ninety-nine out of a hundred have) like other people, speak as other people do.

Another trick, advocated by Dr. Arnott, was to open the glottis by prefixing B or A to every word, and drawl the words out as if in singing -successful enough, at times, in slight stammers; as was, in a case I knew, a dodge which sounded equally ludicrous and miraculous. The stammerer-stutterer, ratherwho was an unwise, hasty person, had been taught when he stuck at a word, to pull up, and say 'say' before it whereon out came the long tortured word, alive and well, to the amusement of the offender, in whom Sir! your abominable kickkick-kick-say conduct!' moved anything but indignation or contrition.

But in the great majority of cases all attempts at cure were failures. One bad habit had been temporarily expelled by another; and the consequence was this. As long as the fresh trick which had been taught compelled the patient to speak slowly and with attention to his words, so long was he benefited: as soon as he began to speak freely and with ease, all his old bad habits returned, in spite of the new one.

The strongest proof that all such empirical methods failed, is thisthat stammerers, some twenty years ago threw themselves in despair on the tender mercies of the regular surgeon, and submitted to be far worse treated by him than by the quacks.

The doctors had an excuse. They were quite disgusted with the quacks. Stammering, they said, was a disease; and as such came under their jurisdiction. Unfortu nately, they forgot to examine first whether stammering was a disease. If they had done so fairly, they would have found that it was no more part of their business to cure it, than to teach fencing, or dancing, or singing, or any other conscious and scientific use of bodily organs. But stammering was a disease-a disease of the tongue; and twenty years ago the knife was the cure for most of the ills which flesh is

heir to. So on the strange hypothesis that the way to make an organ work healthily, is to hack, scar, and maim the same, they tried a series of experiments (not always in corpore vili), dividing muscles, cutting out triangular wedges from the root of the tongue, and what not. Dieffenbach wrote a book on this last operation, invented curious instruments for performing it, and being a skilful man, performed it again and again-somewhat to his own surprise, it seems-without killing his victim. Mr. Yearsley, in England, had his methods of hacking and hewing at that unruly member, such as even St. James, however severely he may have judged it, would scarcely have wished to see carried on in flesh and blood. Mr. Braid scrambled with Yearsley and Dieffenbach for the honour of the discovery: and the net result was this. As long as the wretched

creatures were stiff from their wounds, they spoke somewhat more plainly. As soon as the tongue was healed, it began to fly about in the mouth once more, and with rapid speaking the stammering returned.

The great Liston, to his honour, lifted up his voice against these stupid brutalities (one can use no milder term when one thinks of the useless torture to which people were put, because medical men would meddle with matters beyond their province, and having meddled, would not take the trouble carefully to investigate the matter). Harvey, Vincent, and others, protested likewise against the equally rash plan of cutting out the tonsils and uvula ; and gradually the knife fell into merited disrepute but not till after a man or two had died from mutilation of the tongue.

Meanwhile the true method of cure, or at least its elements, had suggested itself to a hard-headed gentleman of Dorsetshire, a Mr. Hunt, the father of a man to whom this writer is under deep obligations, which he here most publicly confesses-who, when an undergraduate at Cambridge, set himself to cure a stammering friend, and by dint of minute philosophy-in plain English, using his eyes and his common sense-succeeded. Delighted with his first attempt, he went on with his plan, and left college to set up as a doctor of stammering-not without angry barks from the medical profession.

He found, however, among them two valuable friends, Sir John Forbes and the great Liston, who were true to him throughout his life. One letter of Liston's to him is so valuable, as a testimonial, that I shall insert it entire :

I have with much pleasure witnessed Mr. Hunt's process for the removal of stammering. It is founded on correct physiological principles, is simple, effica cious, and unattended by pain or inconvenience. Several young persons have in my presence been brought to him for the first time; some of them could not utter a sentence, however short, without hesitation and frightful contortions of the features. In less than half an hour, after following Mr. Hunt's instructions, they have been able to speak and to read continuously, long

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passages without difficulty. Some of these persons had previously been subjected to painful and unwarrantable incisions, and had been left, with their palates horribly mutilated, hesitating in their speech, and stuttering as before.

When to two such names as Liston and Forbes are added those of Robert Chambers and John Forster, the reader has authority enough before him to make him at least read patiently what this writer has to say on a subject which most approach with distrust and prejudice; and not unjustly, considering the amount of unwisdom which has been spoken and acted over it.

The Elder Hunt's 'System' as he called it, is a very pretty instance of sound inductive method hit on by simple patience and common

sense.

He first tried to find out how people stammered; and for this purpose had to find out how people spoke plain-to compare the normal with the abnormal use of the organs. But this involved finding out what the organs used were, a matter little understood thirty years ago by scientific men, still less by Hunt, who had only a Cambridge education and mother wit to help him. However, he, found out; and therewith found out, by patient comparing of health with unhealth, a fact which seems to have escaped all before him-that the abuse neither of the tongue nor of any other single organ, is the cause of stammering that the whole malady is so complicated that it is very difficult to perceive what organs are abused at any given moment-quite impossible to discover what organ first went wrong, and set the rest wrong. For nature, in the perpetual struggle to return to a goal to which she knows not the path, is ever trying to correct one morbid action by another; and to expel vice by vice; ever trying fresh experiments of mis-speaking, and failing, alas in all: so that the stammer may take very different forms from year to year; and the boy who began to stammer with the lip, may go on to stammer with the tongue, then with the jaw, and last and worst of all, with the breath; and in after

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life, try to rid himself of one abuse by trying in alternation all the other three.

To these four abuses-of the lips, of the tongue, of the jaw, and of the breath-old Mr. Hunt reduced his puzzling mass of morbid phenomena; and I for one believe his division to be sound and exhaustive.

He saw, too, soon, that stammering was no organic disease, but simply the loss of a habit (always unconscious) of articulation; and his notion of his work was naturally, and without dodge or trick, to teach the patient to speak consciously, as other men spoke unconsciously.

He was somewhat hindered in his judgment as to what right articulation might be, by the want of that anatomical knowledge which ought to have revealed his method to the regular medical man. Too old to supply the defect in himself, he supplied it in his son by giving him a surgeon's education; the fruit of which, and of much curious thought and wide reading on the whole matter, may be found in his Philosophy of Voice and Speech, just published-a book which should be in the hands, not only of surgeons, but of public singers, public speakers, schoolmasters, and above all, of preachers.

It may be seen from all this that there is no secret in Mr. Hunt's system,' except in as far as all natural processes are a secret to those who do not care to find them out. Any one who will examine for himself how he speaks plain, and how his stammering neighbour does not, may cure him, as Mr. Hunt did, and conquer nature by obeying her.' But he will not do it. He must give a lifetime to the work, as he must to any work which he wishes to do well. And he had far better leave the work to the few (when I say few, I know none but my friend Dr. James Hunt) who have made it their ergon and differential energy throughout life. Still less will those succeed who, having got hold of a few of old Mr. Hunt's rules, fancy that they know his secret. Old Mr. Hunt's secret was, a shrewd English brain, backed by bulldog English determination, to