EDITOR OVERLAND,

Sir: Le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle. That is the dictum of the writer of an article on "The Study of Short-hand," in the December number of the CALIFORNIAN AND OVERLAND MONTHLY, which has just come under my notice. In the first place, he says that to learn short-hand thoroughly is as difficult as to learn three European languages; and in the next place, when the art is acquired, it is of very little use to any but professional reporters. Such, in brief, is the conclusion at which the writer has arrived, and against which I desire to record an emphatic protest. Dickens says, in his humorous and exaggerating style, that short-hand is as difficult to learn as six languages; but I suppose that no one ever took his statement seriously. Of course a great deal depends upon what is meant by learning short-hand. A mere knowledge of the alphabet, the principles of contraction, and the abbreviated words constitutes no one a short-hand writer, any more than a perfect acquaintance with musical rules and symbols constitutes the person who possesses it a musician. The most intimate knowledge of the mysteries of harmony and counterpoint will not impart the ability to sing a song or play an instrument skillfully; and a student of Mr. Pitman's "Manual" and "Reporters' Companion" may know those books by heart, and yet be unable to report the slowest speaker that ever addressed an audience. Long and diligent practice in both cases is required to attain the needful manipulative dexterity. That is generally admitted; but to say that a fair amount of short-hand skill, that will enable the student both to write fluently and read his notes easily, requires as much study and practice as is necessary to acquire a corresponding familiarity with three foreign languages, is to my mind a great exaggeration. I quite admit that many persons take up the study without counting the cost.

They listen, perhaps, to a lecture on the subject, and are charmed with the ease with which the little illustrative words are written, little thinking of what is behind and beyond They purchase an elementary treatise, learn the alphabet, get through a few exercises, and at the first difficulty take fright and give up the task. Or, they go farther and master the elements of the system, and then set about learning and practising the reporting abbreviations. They may even acquire a certain amount of facility in writing, but not being content with anything short of extreme proficiency, and being unwilling to expend the necessary labor in its acquisition, they relinquish the effort entirely. I know all this only too well, having taught hundreds of pupils, who at one stage or other of their progress have fallen out of the ranks. But how about Latin and Greek and French and German? how about music? how about any study or accomplishment that may be named? Of the vast number of persons who learn some dead or living language, how many pursue the study sufficiently to enable them to read a book, much less to carry on a conversation in it? I suppose not one in ten. And this result is due not so much to the extreme difficulty of the study, as to natural indolence, to a shrinking from some unforeseen difficulty, or to a fading interest in the pursuit. Short-hand is no exception to the general rule. The number of those who thoroughly master it will always bear but a small proportion to those who begin the study, unless, indeed, it is taught as it should be, in school, as a necessary branch of education, and comes into use for the every-day purposes of life. It is often said, and not without truth, with regard to the classical languages, that even if they are dropped from the very day that the boy. leaves school, the mental discipline involved in their study has been worth all the labor bestowed. The writer to whom I have al

luded denies that anything of this kind can be said for the study and practice of shorthand. It can be pursued, he says, by people without brains a statement that is a little inconsistent with the idea of its being as difficult as three languages-and no earthly good can come of the process of acquisition.

Such an allegation implies an entire forgetfulness of what that process really is. Let us see what the student of phonography has to acquire, and how he accomplishes the task. (I take phonography as an illustration, because I am more familiar with it than with any other system, and because phonography and short-hand are nowadays almost convertible terms.)

At the very outset he has brought before him what, in all probability, he has never thought of previously, an analysis of the sounds of his language. One of the disadvantages of the common spelling is that it conveys no accurate idea of the sounds of words and their relation to each other; and the result is, that most persons, however easily they can read and write, have very imperfect and confused ideas on a subject which ought to be an elementary part of education. The very first exercise of the phonographic student is a useful lesson in phonetics. The sounds of the language are, so to say, marshaled before him in scien tific order, and their correlation is impressed upon his mind by the very forms of the short-hand alphabet. I am sure that the knowledge thus acquired comes upon many a phonographer as a revelation: it certainly did so in my own case. It opens up, too, a field of thought and research that can hardly fail to interest any intelligent mind; and even if the field is not of set purpose traversed or explored, the student insensibly and necessarily acquires an amount of elementary knowledge on the subject, which is a valuable addition to his intellectual attainments. Even this, which is but an incidental advantage in the study of phonography, involves something of the mental discipline which the writer in the CALIFORNIAN says is associated with other studies, but is not to

be had in connection with the acquisition of short-hand.

Then, surely, it is a distinct benefit to the student to have his eye and hand trained to accuracy, and even beauty of form. Where phonography is properly taught, the learner is instructed to write the characters with great care and precision; and as he advances he discovers the absolute necessity of making more or less minute distinctions, which to an untrained hand would be almost impossible. The ability can only be acquired by close attention and diligent practice; and to suppose that this implies no mental discipline is assuredly a misapprehension. The memory, too, and other mental faculties, are certainly called into exercise in learning the numerous rules, abbreviations, and lists of contracted words and phrases with which the system abounds. I say advisedly "other mental faculties," because it is not a mere matter of memory and manual dexterity. The great variety of outlines which is possible in phonography for some words makes a demand upon the judgment of the writer, founded, of course, on experience, in selecting the most facile forms, and watchfulness in avoiding the pitfalls which will always beset the unwary writer. Can it then be said with any show of reason that the study "makes the least draft upon the mental resources of all studies in the world"? Clearly not.

I have hitherto dealt only with the early efforts of the phonographer in learning the system: let us follow him in his subsequent practice to increase his speed in writing and his facility in reading. To accomplish this object he must write a great deal from dictation, and if he has any desire for self-improvement he will naturally select for his practice something that will be instructive as well as interesting. He must also frequently read his notes, and thus go over the same ground a second time; and it is hardly likely that he can both read and write the contents of a book without assimilating them to some extent with his intellectual life. If he fails to do so, it is a proof that he has been practicing carelessly as well as unintelligently.

these conditions, I venture to assert with confidence that the training required, first in acquisition and then in the actual practice of the art, is of high educational value.

Still more is this the case when he tries his hand at actual reporting: writing not from dictation, but from public speeches. If he does this with judgment, the mental exercise involved is invaluable. The notetaking itself is no trifling matter, and requires careful training. Almost all the senses are called into active exercise, and the general perception is sharpened by practice. The hearing becomes more acute, and the attention must be close and sustained. The writer must listen to one set of words while he is actually writing another; and if he would avoid absurd mistakes, must attend to the general drift of the discourse, as well as to the phraseology employed. But in the work of transcription there is a still stronger demand upon the intellectual faculties. If the speaking is simple, straightforward, and accurate, it is comparatively easy; but if the style is obscure or involved, and the subject technical or otherwise difficult, the task of rendering the notes into good readable English is one that must always be attended with considerable mental exertion. This is wholly inconsistent with the assumption of the article I have cited, and it ought not to have escaped the notice of the writer. Singularly enough, he makes no allusion whatever to it. He speaks of the work, indeed, as one requiring "long years of incessant toil," but would lead his readers to infer that it is mechanical toil merely, attended with no mental cultivation. I know well enough that the work is often undertaken by ignorant and incompetent persons; but in that case it is always badly done, notwithstanding the training that has been gone through. I assume, however, as I have a right to assume, that a reasonable amount of intelligence and industry, and a fair substratum of general knowledge, are brought to bear upon the

The second postulate of the article in the CALIFORNIAN-that short-hand, when acquired, is of little or no use to any but professional reporters-is as inaccurate as the first. Apart from the discipline involved in the acquirement of the art of short-hand, to which I have alluded at some length, the practical uses to which it can be applied are so numerous, and have been so often pointed out, that I am surprised they should be overlooked. The advantages of short-hand to a student who attends lectures, or wishes to make long extracts from books, are obvious. I have known many young men who have largely profited by the writing facility which phonography has given them. Every one who has much writing to do to be read by himself would find the acquisition invaluable. Many clergymen write their sermons in short-hand, and thereby save many hours every week. The vast amount of business correspondence carried on by short-hand clerks, writing from the dictation of their principals, whose time is thus largely economized, is in itself a sufficient contradiction of the statement that short-hand is of little use except to professional reporters.

Before leaving the subject, I wish to correct the exaggerated estimate of the CALIFORNIAN writer of the labor attending the study of short-hand. He describes it as "a tremendous and tedious task," which can only be accomplished by "obstinate perseverance in distasteful drudgery." That the labor is sometimes underestimated is no valid reason for offering such a discouraging prospect to the short-hand student. The task is neither tremendous nor tedious; it requires a good deal of application, but not more than a hundred other subjects which are daily and hourly pursued; and it can only be distasteful to those who are by nature indolent, or have some idiosyncrasy which renders all writing irksome.

There are one or two other misapprehen

sions which must not be left altogether unnoticed. The writer, describing the work of the practical stenographer, says that he must "be able to decipher with a mere glance thousands of outlines differing very slightly in appearance, and at least half of which may stand for any one of about thirty different words." The writer does not tell us what system he himself writes; but if the foregoing statement is made from his own personal experience, I can quite understand his estimate of the "tremendous" and "tedious" character of the work which the shorthand writer has before him; and am not surprised to read, farther on, that "until you can read by the context, your reading will always be too slow as well as too unreliable." I pity the unfortunate transcriber who has for half of his short-hand characters to make a selection from thirty possible renderings. A cuneiform inscription is nothing to a page of short-hand notes of so indefinite a character.

Valuable and even necessary as the context often is in deciphering notes, an exaggerated statement like that which I have quoted, as to the dependence of the reader upon it, is wholly misleading. I admit that, in some of the fac-simile specimens of short-hand notes which I have seen in Browne's "Phonographic Monthly," the characters are so badly written as to be almost illegible with or without the aid of the context; they are at best a caricature upon phonography, and would puzzle a Champollion or a Wilkinson to decipher. Fairly written, phonography may be read with comparatively little aid from the context, and I have sometimes seen

BATH, ENGLAND.

notes so accurately written that they could be almost read backward.

Another illustration of the writer's exaggerating tendencies is to be found in his allusion to the reporters employed at the great trial of Tilton v. Beecher. They were about seventy in number; but none of them, it seems, could keep pace with an Englishman who wrote Gurney's system, and who "scribbled like a perfect demon, running often to two hundred and fifty words a minute for several minutes." As the statement carries with it its own contradiction, I will say nothing further about it.

The only insight which the writer gives us of the style of short-hand he employs is his statement that he has "discarded all vowels, especially all use of position, which is a useless nuisance; . . . . nearly all phrase-writing; all use of 'the,' 'of,' 'a,' 'and,' etc.; and all such terminations as 'ing,' etc.; all attempts to make everything the exact length, breadth, curve, etc." To say nothing of the three "et ceteras," which may include anything, one can quite understand the astounding results that might follow from the employment of a style of short-hand of this al fresco and dégagé character. The writer says that after two or three months of this change of practice the legibility was as great as ever. Probably. I remember being once gravely told by a reporter that he never wrote a vowel, and always omitted con, ing, etc. "Are you serious?" I asked. "Perfectly." "Then kindly tell me how you would write the word 'conveying."" With this inquiry I take leave. of the OVERLAND. T. A. Reed.

EDITOR OVERLAND.

Sir: The article on "The Study of Shorthand," in the December number of the CALIFORNIAN, cannot be accepted as satisfactory. There is, perhaps, among our literati of the present day an evidence of too strong a temptation to say a thing well, rather than to say it truthfully, and to feel that, if the facts

do not always justify a well-turned period, "so much the worse for the facts."

The desirableness of a right impression. on the minds of learners would seem a sufficient excuse for a restatement of the case from the standpoint of actual experience, being guided by the general tenor of evidence from those whose business as teachers, and

whose notation of many individual cases best qualify for judgment in the matter.

I cannot accept the conclusion to which the writer of the article evidently comesthat authors and teachers of short-hand are unfit to give any advice on the subject to which they have given their best efforts, and into which they have delved most deeply. The gentleman would scarcely think of barring out, as incompetent in their special lines, authors of text-books on anatomy, mathematics, or history, simply because they are authors; but their authorship would be taken as prima facie evidence of their fitness to advise most intelligently in reference to those subjects.

I pass over, as conveying no definite idea whatever to the average mind, the interjected statement that "any fair penman can write in long-hand thirty words a minute, and can read the same 'when cold' at the rate of two hundred words a minute, and even much faster. Here is an average of two minutes' work spent in using two hundred and thirty words, supposing no further use be made of them." I come, then, to the assertion that "short-hand involves no mental discipline." Can it be that our ideas of what constitutes mental discipline have been so far erroneous? Does not mental discipline result from great rapidity of thought, thorough study of grammatical relations, the collocation of words and sentences, and the sequence of ideas? Then, surely, our educators must have been laboring under a great delusion in urging the mental discipline afforded by the study of the dead languages, as the chief excuse for retaining that study in their college curriculums. Then all previous writers on phonetic short-hand with whom I have a reading acquaintance must have been radically mistaken in their estimate of the mental benefits accruing from the prosecution of this art. And if to "learn it requires little more brains than setting type," then can the most rapid mental operations be carried on by the stupid as well as the quick-witted. This writer says: "The learning of short-hand of any kind involves only drudgery, pure

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and simple." This sentence might be amended in the interest of truth to say, "The learning of short-hand of any kind involves drudgery." His statement, virtually, that "a speed of one hundred and twenty words per minute is a work of years," will not be indorsed by any practical teachers. It is true that the systematic presenta

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and prosecution of the study has not been well understood until within a few years past, but late experience indicates that the above estimate is very wide of the mark.

He says: "One hour a day for five years is infinitely better than five hours a day for one year." This is emphatically the most unreliable statement in the whole article; and I am almost constrained to think the types have "put words into his mouth," and reversed his original assertion. alike repugnant to reason and experience. Given a lesson to be learned, which requires ten daily repetitions for its acquirement: does anybody believe that that lesson will be memorized more thoroughly by placing the repetitions one week or one month apart, instead of a day? The learning of shorthand is largely a matter of memory, and it is a matter of repeating forms so many times, and the oftener that repetition occurs, consistent with mental freshness and vigor, the more thorough will be the impression produced. A little reflection will convince any one that this is universally true in all matters of memory.

The assertion that "no system of shorthand can materially shorten the labor of learning" is of a piece with the one just quoted. He may as well tell us that, as aids in the acquisition of any art, complexity vies with simplicity, incongruity with analogy, and confusion with order. To supplement this assertion, let him now tell us that brief long-hand is just as capable as phonography, and that Chinese literature, which is hieroglyphic, is as easy of acquisition as Spanish, with its phonetic orthography. But what shall be said of the statement that "all new systems in vogue are new systems just as the Roman alphabet with a turned