To maintain that "_sound etymology has nothing to do with sound_," is tantamount to the contention that language is not sound, which is obviously absurd. In the saner view of Dr. Latham: "language begins with voice, language ends with voice". The Germans, Poles, and Russians had no acquaintance with letters until the ninth century, and speech, which certainly existed for unnumbered centuries before either writing or spelling was evolved, must, primarily and essentially, have been a system of pure and simple phonetics, spreading, as a mother teaches her child, syllable by syllable, word upon word, and line upon line. To rule sound out of language, is, indeed, far more fatal than to purge Hamlet out of _Hamlet_. One may prove by super-ingenious logic and an elaborate code of cross references that black is white and white black, yet common sense knows all the time that it is not so. There are, I am aware, certain races who are unable to vocalise certain sounds and accordingly modify them. The obscure causes governing these phonetic changes must be taken into account, and as far as possible formulated into "laws," but the pages of Skeat and Murray demonstrate beyond refutation two very simple but very certain fundamental, universal facts, to which hitherto wholly insufficient attention has been given. These elementary and seemingly never-varying facts are: (1) That originally vowel sounds were of no importance whatever, for in the same word they vary to the utmost limits, not only in different areas and in different eras, but contemporaneously in different grades of society; (2) that heavy and light consonants such as _b_ and _p_, _d_ and _t_, _f_ and _v_, _g_ and _k_, etc., are always interchangeable. Whether in place-names, words, or proper names, the changes are found _always_ to occur, and they are precisely those variations which common sense would suggest must occur in every case where words travel _viva voce_ and not via script or print. A man suffering from what Shakespeare would term "a whoreson rheum," says, for instance, _did vor dad_ instead of _tit for tat_, and there is, so far as I can discover, not a single word or a solitary place-name in which a similar variation of thin and thick consonants is not traceable. The formidable Grimm's Law, any violation of which involves summary and immediate condemnation, is merely a statement of certain phonetic facts which happen invariably--unless they are interfered with by other facts. The permutations of sound codified by Grimm are as follows:-- Greek _p_ Gothic _f_ Old High German _b_(_v_) " _b_ " _p_ " _f_ " _ph_ " _b_ " _p_ " _t_ " _th_ " _d_ " _d_ " _t_ " _z_ " _th_ " _d_ " _t_ " _k_ " (_h_) " _g_(_h_) " _g_ " _k_ " _ch_ " _kh_ " _g_ " _k_