Director Stanton, of the Metropolitan Opera House, in New York, is obliged every summer to make a trip to Germany and look about for dramatic singers wherewith to replenish his casts. As a number of American singers have already won fame here and abroad, the time no doubt will come when he will be able to find the dramatic singers he needs at home, and when opera in English will have supplanted foreign opera, so far as the language is concerned. But until that happy epoch arrives every aspirant to operatic honors cannot be too strongly urged to begin his or her studies by learning the French and German languages. Almost all the greatest singers of the century have been able not only to sing but to speak in several languages. Above all things, students of song should learn to speak their own language. Mr. H.C. Deacon remarks that "no nation in the civilized world speaks its language so abominably as the English.... Familiar conversation is carried on in inarticulate smudges of sound which are allowed to pass current for something, as worn-out shillings are accepted as representatives of twelvepence.... When English people begin to study singing, they are astonished to find that they have never learned to speak." Mr. Deacon's strictures do not apply in all their force to Americans, for the average American speaks English more distinctly than the average Englishman; yet there is room for vast improvement in the enunciation of our singers. Now, the great value of the German style to English students lies in this, that it emphasizes above all things the importance of correct and distinct speech in song. Julius Hey, of Munich, who has just published a vocal method which will mark an epoch in the teaching of singing, devotes the whole of his first volume to an analysis of the elements of speech, and to exercises in speaking. The second and third volumes contain vocal exercises for male and female voices, while the fourth volume, which has just appeared, discusses the special characteristics of the German dramatic method, and gives detailed instructions for the development and training of each variety of voice, together with an appendix in which some of the most popular operatic roles are analyzed and described. It is a book which no teacher or student who wishes to keep abreast of the times can afford to be without.