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The property of articulateness of sound is very apt to be disguised, by strange accompaniments, beyond the reach of identity. Our ear for articulation is formed in the first instance on the voices around us; we identify with ease a letter or a word as pronounced by those; in fact, the casual peculiarities of their manner become, as it were, fused with our sense of the articulations themselves. A child born in Yorkshire acquires an ear for the vowels and consonants of the alphabet as sounded in Yorkshire. If we pass into Middlesex, the articulations correspond without being identical; and we may or may not identify the old words under the new utterance. The experiment would show whether the ear is good as respects the essential quality of articulate form, just as the trials above alluded to show the degree of delicacy as regards the pitch of a note. Some ears are but faintly susceptible to the distinctiveness of the articulations, or to the essential difference between one vowel and another, and between one consonant and those closely allied to it. If such ears happen to be acutely sensible to the qualities of different voices, and to differences of emphasis, or stress, they will be more strongly acted on by the disagreements than by the agreements.

Pronunciation, accent or brogue, cadence and elocution generally, form a large part of the collective impression of articulate utterance: to which we must add gesticulation and inanner as apparent to the eye. Taking all these sources of diversity in connexion with the one main feature of articulate utterance, we may derive an unlimited fund of examples of re-instatement made difficult by unlike accompaniments. Voice, pronunciation, accent, cadence, and gesticulation, are inseparable from articulation; and we become accustomed to the sound of words as beset with a particular mode of each of these effects. Often indeed we take up a meaning from manner alone. Accordingly, when we come to listen to strangers, to the people of another province, to foreigners, we experience the difficulty of identifying the articulation in the midst of unusual combinations. The goodness of the ear for

articulation proper is submitted to a trying ordeal, as the ear for pitch is tested by the sound of a strange instrument. The trial is greatest of all when we are endeavouring to acquire a foreign language. Here the one effect of the articulation of vowels and consonants, needs to make itself felt amid the distraction of a manifold variety of other effects. Nothing proves so decisively the goodness of the articulate sensibility of the ear, as the readiness to follow a foreigner speaking his own language. The power of identifying the essentials of the articulation in the diversity of all else, is in such circumstances conspicuously manifested. It will happen, however, that a person is more than usually sensitive to some of the accompaniments that do not concern the conveyance of the meaning; an ear strongly impressed with the accent and cadence, and permitting itself to be much engrossed with the different turns of the emphasis and modulation, is by that circumstance rendered more obtuse to the articulate character or to the meaning of the words. The thunder of a diverse and unaccustomed cadence drowns the still small voice of expressive utterance. An acute ear for oratory is thus a great obstruction to the acquirement of languages; so is an eye unduly impressed with gesticulate display. In listening to our own language, spoken in the style that we are accustomed to, the sensitiveness to those accompaniments is in our favour, and brings home the meaning all the more powerfully; but when they are totally changed in character, as when we listen to a Frenchman, we are just as much put out, in identifying the articulation, as in the other case we were assisted.

20. The ear, as formerly remarked, is the principal matrix for embodying our recollections of language. A speech heard is, in great part, remembered as a connected series of auditory impressions. Our recollections of this class are liable to be recalled by similarity, under circumstances of diversity. We can scarcely listen to any address, without being reminded of many past addresses, through occurring phrases, tones, and peculiarities that lead us into some formerly experienced

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track of impressions on our ear. The greater our susceptibility to the articulate quality that governs distinctness of meaning, the more readily shall we fall upon previous addresses that correspond in phraseology; if we are more alive to tone, accent, and cadence, these qualities will preside over the recall of the former occasions when we were in the

position of listeners. In this way, we are led to detect similarities of manner and phrase in different speakers; we hunt out imitation and plagiarism, and institute comparisons among various styles of address. With regard to the diversities tending to obstruct the reviving impetus of likeness, they may lie in the context of the agreeing phrases, or in the other peculiarities not connected with meaning; or else in the subject matter and sentiment of the address. As in former cases, we pronounce the attraction of similarity powerful when it breaks through a great discordance, and the discordance great that arrests the reviving stroke of similarity; in fact, we must measure each force by the opposition that it conquers. If a verbal likeness has the effect of interpolating some old recollection, in a subject most discordant with it, we pronounce the conditions aiding verbal similarity to be highly developed, or the regard to the subject feeble, or both.

21. Among Sensations of Sight, the occasions for identifying sameness in diversity correspond with the wide range of the sense. We can identify colours in spite of difference of shade; obtaining classes of blues, of reds, of yellows. The existence of such classes implies both sameness and difference; the class-name being derived from the sameness, or the effect common to all the individuals. When a colour is intermediate between two principal colours, as between yellow and red, we may fail to class it with either, not being struck with any feeling of identity in the case; whereupon we constitute a new colour, as orange. It may also happen that, to one mind, the colour may appear as red, and to another yellow, according to the previous impression that it most readily revives. Next as to the property of lustre:

a varnished substance, a glossy fabric, a polished surface in metal or stone, a film of wet, a clear brook, a covering of glass,-all strike the mind with a common effect of brilliancy; and if the power of similarity is sufficient, each one of these effects may recall the others, so as to muster in the present view a host of things, very different in general appearance, but all agreeing in a particular impression. Looking at a brilliantly polished marble chimney-piece, one man may be reminded only of polished stones of various kinds; another, breaking through a greater shroud of diversity, compares the effect with metallic polish. Speculating yet farther on the kind of influence exerted on the mind by such effects, a third person brings up a still more remote subject, varnished surfaces; from these he may proceed to glossy silks and polished leather; and, by a stretch still more remote, he may include in the comparison the effect of a pebbly bottom through a clear running rivulet. But in order to carry an identity so far as would be implied in this series of objects, it would be necessary that one should have not merely a feeling of the common effect of lustrous brilliancy, but also a notion of its depending on a transparent covering over a mass of colour. Such notion, added to the feeling of effect, might enable one to break through the great difference between a marble chimney-piece and a pool of water.

In the combinations of colour with visible Form and Size -the optical with the muscular impressions of sight-we have an additional scope for tracing likeness amidst diversity. We identify a common colour through all varieties of objects, large, small, round, square, straight, crooked, here and there and everywhere. Thus it is that we have in our mind a class-notion for every colour-a common impression of white, red, or blue, obtained from many diverse objects. According to our susceptibility to colour, is the number, the depth, and the permanence of these common effects; in other words, the distinct shades of colour stored in our recollection. The work begun by Discrimination is completed by

Agreement; both functions concurring to form abiding impressions of colours. We identify every various shade in the midst of diversities of material, form, size, and surroundings.

The identification and generalization of forms, in the midst of every possible difference in colour and dimensions, opens up another vein of illustration. We identify a circular outline in some bodies; the oval shape in others; there is an infinity of classes determined by form, including not merely the regular figures of Geometry, but all the recurring shapes in nature and art-egg-shaped, heart-shaped, pear-shaped, vase-shaped, cup-shaped, lanceolate, &c., &c. These comparisons arise out of identity in the attribute of form, seen through diversity in all other respects. Most of the identifications are sufficiently easy to strike any observer; while instances occasionally arise where only a certain number of minds are struck with the likeness, or experience the revival of the old upon the new. Thus, in the descriptions of botany, the shapes of leaf and flower are often represented by comparisons that are far from apparent to an ordinary observer, demanding the familiarized perception of the botanist. In anatomical descriptions there is not unfrequently an analogous want of obvious resemblance.

The case of mathematical forms and artificial diagrams is both peculiar and interesting; but the important strokes of likeness in diversity that occur in science, are rather more complicated than the examples falling properly under our present head. The generalization of the forms themselvesof triangle, square, parallelogram, ellipse, &c.-through differences of subject, is all that we can quote on the subject of tracing similarity among our sensations of sight. And we may remark here, as on a former occasion, that a strong sensitiveness to the other properties of things, that is, to their colours, dimensions, material, uses, influences on the feelings, &c., is an obstruction to the process of identifying the mathematical form. A burning volcano suggests a comparison, not with the diagrams of the cone in a book of Geometry, but with images of conflagration and explosive energy.