constantly rises and falls, is elevated and depressed, was long ago observed,1 and the law in this application known by the name of rise and fall.2 But how does the voice come to be subject to this law? The more immediate cause lies in the so-called beating of the pulse or heart, i.e. in the undulatory strokes of the blood, and of the breathing which stands in reciprocal relation to it. For speaking is an action connected with expiration, and is produced by sounds of various kinds being elicited from it, as the air pssses through its canal at two principal points (the head of the windpipe and the mouth) through the co-operation of the organs there situated. The tones produced at the first place are clear tones (vowels); the others are sounds, more or less perceptible, which serve as accompaniments to the former (hence called consonants), and together with them form a single sound or syllable. It is consequently clear that, when one speaks, the supply of breath (i.e. of the air thrown out after each inhalation) which is expended in the production of articulate sounds, is divided into as many parts or single expulsions of the breath as there are separate members or single sounds in the discourse. Since, however, the breath expelled proceeds from a source characterized by undulation, i.e. from the beating of the heart, its separate expulsions cannot flow out in a uniform, smooth stream, but must constantly rise and fall in waves, like those of the blood in the beating of the pulse, i.e. exhibit a constant alternation of strength and weakness, elevation and depression. And this alternation expresses itself, of course, in the tones produced by it, primarily therefore in an alter

1 E.g. by DeWette, Introd. to Commentary on the Psalms, No. VII., p. 52 of ed. 3. (It is wanting in the 4th ed.)

2 Probably borrowed from the term used by the Greek grammarians, &pois and és which is applied by Priscianus and modern writers on metre (especially by Bentley, in the Schediasma de metris Terentianis, I.) to the voice, but properly refers to the movement of the foot or hand in beating time, and has, therefore, just the opposite meaning, viz. @éois is the stroke of the foot or hand (Latin ictus) which accompanies the accented part of the measure; &pois is the unaccented part. So sublatio and positio in Quinctilian.

8 Vid. my Essay "Von der Natur und den Arten der Sprachlaute" in Jahn's Jahrbücher der Philologie, 1829, Vol. I. No. 4, p. 451 sq.

nation of strong and weak syllables, and thus manifests itself as a law of the movement of the voice. This is the natural law from which the so-called accent or tone proceeds, which, in this aspect of it, is nothing else than those elevations (summits) of the waves of the breath and voice, or of the stronger expulsions of the breath, which, alternating with weaker expulsions or depressions of the voice, produce in speech the antithesis of tone and tonelessness, of accented and unaccented parts of speech, like the antithesis of light and shade. Now, this antithesis, and its regular, constant return, is in speech, strictly speaking, what is designated by a Greek word, much used but little understood, rhythm 2 (Lat. numerus or numeri), and is the same thing as measure. Accent, as the climax of this, appears accordingly to be of rhythmical origin and nature; i.e. the origin of it, as well as the law of its movement, is not chiefly logical, but physical, i.e. traceable to the rhythm or undulation of the blood and breath, and hence of the voice.

That this is the origin and character of accent is shown by observing in all languages- at least in all which have long and short syllables and any definite accent at all — the rules respecting the position of the accent, or the determination of the location and quality of the stress. This — whatever influence etymology and composition may in particular cases have upon it is everywhere subject to, and conditioned by, the higher law of rhythm or statics. Inasmuch as this law of accentuation has, so far as I know, not been sufficiently

1 Voice is, properly speaking, the clear tone (so vor, pwvh) produced in the glottis, contained in the vowel (hence vocalis, perheis) and constituting the loud, sounding element of the language; then in a wider sense, instrument of speech in general. The breath in its modifications just mentioned works primarily only on the tone of the glottis, or a vowel which it produces; but, since this is the soul of the syllable, and of language in general, it works by means of it on the whole language.

=

2 Etymologically it denotes (from péw, to flow) a stream ῥεῦμα. Applied to the flow of speech, it must designate either, as Buttmann thinks, an easy, flowing motion, or, since that is too vague for the figure and the thing meant, the wavelike, rocking, uniform rise and fall of the motion, and so just the essence of the so-called rhythm. Cf. above, note 4.

noticed or recognized, I have undertaken to give a more particular demonstration of it in the appended excursus.

Before following the rhythmical principle of accentuation in its wider application to the larger divisions of speech, it may be well to illustrate briefly its manifestations in other expressions of human life. It is self-evident that the same law must hold especially with regard to other tones produced by the breath-to singing and to the music of wind instruments, in all of which, together with the alternation of high and low tones (melody), is observable a constant antithesis of loud and soft tones. This antithesis and regular alternanation — which, on account of the stronger intonation and unfolding of the voice, is here much more prominent than in speaking—has here long ago been noticed and known by the name of measure, designated in written music by the socalled bar, by which the musical strains are divided into parts, all equal to each other in length. The rationale of measure, however, is to be found in nothing else than this constant alternation of loud and soft tones, or of accented and unaccented tones. Between these, however, at the same time is observable, much more than in speaking, a relation of equilibrium or parallelism. For, since this antithesis flows from the undulatory pulsation of the blood and the breath, both parts, according to the law of hydrostatics, balance each other; and of this that regularity of movement in music is only a consequence although not a necessary one; and accordingly in many ancient rhythms and melodies, Greek as well as German, the measure is looser. Now it is well known that the so-called measure or rhythm is not only characteristic of singing and the music of wind instruments, but is common to all music, even to that of instruments played by the hand, nay, even to all movements of the human body (of the feet in walking and dancing, of the hands, arms, etc.); and is the more conspicuous in proportion to the force and amount of these movements. How is it, now, in these cases to be explained? Just as in the others, by the pulsation of the blood and breath, because these are the sources of all our physical

life, and hence their movement communicates itself to all the movements, and actions, or vital functions of man. Nay, it passes over in its influence into those expressions and states ⚫ of the emotions which stand in more immediate connection with the physical state (of this more below), and it stamps upon them the law of parallelism, measure, rhythm, i.e. of the constant alternation of two antithetic movements, corresponding to, and counterbalancing, each other.1

Returning now to the proper subject of our investigation, language, we should be led by the foregoing discussion to

1 In the details, however, i.e. in the individual members and functions of the human organism, the correspondence of their motions with that of those sources cannot be mathematically proved, i.e. cannot be traced to the same number or to a definite mathematical ratio; nor indeed is there an exact equality in the undulatory strokes of those sources themselves, the blood and the breath (to one inhalation there are ordinarily three or four beats of the pulse). Hence the physiologists whose investigations are directed almost exclusively to the mechanical and chemical structure of the human organism, and who measure, weigh, and count everything, entirely ignore the above considered phenomena of the higher organic life, accent, rhythm, measure, etc., -or if they incidentally speak of them, yet know scientifically nothing about their origin and laws, as little as they do about the reciprocal action of mind and body, and the resultant mixed states and phenomena of this border region, which equally concern physiology and psychology. The law above laid down is rather to be derived from the whole, grand antithetic character which pervades the human organism — and in a lower degree all organic existences-in its countless members and activities, both in the structure of its mechanism, i.e. in the composition and adaptation of its limbs and organs and in the mixture of their elements, and in its movement and activity, i.e. in the individual functions and the co-operation of those organs, in other words, in the life of the organism. Everywhere is seen here reciprocal action, oscillation, regular alternation of opposite qualities, activities, motions or stages of motion, in order constantly to preserve or restore equilibrium and harmony among them; and just herein consists the peculiar and wonderful character of organic life. To this is to be added the great expansibility and elasticity of the organs as influenced by the mind, as is best to be seen in the breath, which by artificial means can be used so much more extensively than is essential to life, and can be adapted to other motions. Hence, however various and diverse the mathematical relation or the exponent of the motion in the several members may be, yet in the general effect the particular deviations and incongruities are lost in the general harmony, in such a way that the organism as a whole exhibits in its movements the great law of rhythm, and stamps it on all organic actions, and thus makes man, so to speak, a rhythmical creature, whose movements however, as may readily be conceived, cannot be mathematically calculated and determined.

VOL. XXIV. No. 93.

confine rhythm and the accent belonging to it to the syllables, or the smallest parts of speech, and thus make it a mere syllabic rhythm and its accent merely a syllabic accent, returning with each couplet of syllables, without regard to the sense and the corresponding divisions naturally made in a discourse. But rhythm does not end with this; and now there presents itself a new, higher aspect of accentuation that from which we started its being used by the mind for its own purposes. It serves, as we have seen, as a means by which the mind by making prominent certain leading syllables, reduces to smaller or greater wholes, or single conceptions, the variety of sounds and syllables of which language, outwardly considered, is composed (which, as it were, constitute the body of language), or rather by which the mind animates these structures or members of the dead body of language, and pictures outwardly to the ear its inner unity. This is done by elevating the accent (raising it to a higher power), applying it to words and sentences as well as to syllables, adapting it by various gradations and distinctions to the sense, in the way described above. Thus, to the simple rhythmical principle of accentuation, a second, complex, logical, or intellectual is joined. These two are quite different from each other. The former is a mechanical one, measuring off the tones with mechanical regularity according to the number of syllables. The latter is an organic one, by which the accentuation is divided into various members and, as it were, built into an organic structure. Hence there arises between them a conflict, especially at the lower stage, in regard to the single word. For the former demands, in accordance with the rhythmical law, the repetition of the accent in polysyllabic words as often as two syllables occur, and on the other hand refuses to give it to a monosyllabic word which immediately follows an accented syllable, in order to avoid such a concurrence of two elevations of the voice as is contrary to the rhythmical law. The latter, on the contrary, can allow to the longest word only one accent, as the exponent of the one notion contained in it, and cannot refuse it even to the small