in, upon easy terms, with the more serviceable and euphonious members of
the Phonetic family, and mere trivial shades of sounds were put upon the
same footing as the pivotal sounds themselves. This is as if certain
obdurate compounds were introduced in the first instance among Chemical
Elements--which subsequent analysis may even prove to be the case in
respect to some substances that we now recognize as Elements--and then,
by assigning to the least important of Elements the same rank, and
giving to them the same attention as to the most important, the number
were augmented beyond the practical or working body of Elements, and our
treatises upon Chemistry encumbered by a mass of useless matter. Or
again, it is as if among the Elements of Music were included all
conceivable sounds, as the squeal, the shriek, the sob, etc.; and as if,
in addition to this, the least intervals, the quarter tones for
instance, were ranked as the musical equals of the whole tones.

If it should prove a matter of fact, as capable of exact scientific
demonstration as any other, that the Consonant and Vowel Elements of
Oral Language are, in a radical and important sense, repetitory of, or
correspondential with, Musical Tones or the Elements of Music, as well
as with Chemical Elements, and these again with the Elements of
Numerical Calculation, of Form, or the Science of Morphology, and, in
fine, with the Prime Metaphysical Elements of Being, or the first
Categories of Thought, perhaps we may by such speculations catch a
glimpse of the possibilities of a great lingual discovery, having the
attributes here indicated. _Why should not the Elements of Speech have
been brought by Nature herself into some sort of parallelism with the
Elements of Thought which it is the special province of Speech to
represent?_ Why, again, should not the Prime Elements of every new
domain of Being be merely a Repetition in new form of the Prime Elements
of the Universe, as a whole, and of those especially of Language, its
representative domain?--Language being the literal word, as Universal
Law is the Logos or the Word _par excellence_, and Divine. In that
event, every speech-element would be of necessity inherently charged
with the precise kind and degree of meaning specifically relating it,
first to one of the Prime Elements of Being, metaphysically considered,
and then, by an echo of resemblance, to one of the Prime Elements of
every subordinate domain of Being thro