is there would be twenty-five in Lyons and seventy in
Marseilles. The admitted garrulity or fluency of southern speaking
is often the cause or the preface to stammering. Thus, comically
concludes M. Claretie, oratorical habits threaten to make stammering
become the order of the day, and for one Vergniaud there will be ten
stutterers, and ten more stutterers for one General Foy. Nevertheless,
in earlier days, Camille Desmoulins stammered, and yet spoke but
little at the Convention. It does not appear that Charles Lamb was
a garrulous person, and in the familiar experience of daily life we
rarely find stutterers to be rapid talkers. Still, this latter
fact really helps M. Chervin's theory, since we may conclude it
is precisely because stammerers find that a very rapid utterance
increases their defect that they force themselves to speak
deliberately, and also not to tire the vocal muscles. Hence, apart
from the jesting inference which M. Claretie, in French journalist's
fashion, is bent son twisting out of the scientific statistics, there
would appear to be a mutual influence, perfectly comprehensible,
of rapidity in utterance and a tendency to stammering. We could not
safely go on to generalize that only voluble people become stutterers,
or that all stutterers are unusually garrulous and unusually eager in
enunciation; but we may conclude that if they are thus careless and
rattling in delivery, their peculiarity will be likely to grow more
marked, and that accordingly a natural tendency to the same defect is
developed by the same habits or necessities of much and rapid talking.

* * * * *

Two illustrations of nineteenth-century precocity, rather superior
to the generality of anecdotes regarding the wisdom of the rising
generation, we find in recent French papers. One of them is originated
by the _Moulin-a-Parole_. Madame de B. was visiting, with her baby,
her friend Madame X. After chattering three-quarters of an hour,
without giving anybody else a chance to put in a word, Madame X.
pauses, when Baby immediately takes up the burden of conversation.
Madame X., getting tired at last, says, "Why do you talk so much,
mignonne? It isn't nice for a little girl like you to do so." "Oh,"
replies Baby very graciously, "it is only so that mamma may rest!" A
little lad furnishes the other instance of the premature sagacity of
modern childhood. A famous merchant has four children, three daughters
and