How do I know all this? I will tell you: By watching the _beginning_ of a vocal sound; the performance actually going on within us, while such sound is first being created. This performance is of an inverse order as between German and English, in so far as the anode for German vocal sounds is located to the right, the cathode to the left. The cathode approaches the anode from left to right; while in the creation of an English vocal sound the anode is to the left, the cathode to the right, and the latter approaches the former from right to left. The location where the union _appears_ to take place is in the chest, near the heart; for German sounds, to the right thereof, for English to the left. As a matter of fact, however, it is in the heart itself. What does the motion in which anode and cathode approach each other--which is not direct as it at first appears to the observer, but vastly circuitous--signify? The circulation through the vascular system of the elements (of the æther) creating vocal sounds, or the _circulation of vocal sounds_. The proofs that this important fact actually obtains will be furnished very positively and very circumstantially at a later date in connection with that part of these expositions which treats on vocal sounds. [Illustration] [Illustration] OUR MOTHER TONGUE Nature will have its right always. What is this right in regard to vocal utterance? It is the manner in which we breathe. When we violate nature's right in our mode of breathing for vocal expression, our penalty is that such expression will not be what it is intended to be, what it should be; the idiomatic expression of every language being the outcome of a special mode of breathing for the same. _All_ my observations in the first instance owe their origin to the fact that I was breathing in a manner directly opposite to the one in which it was necessary for me to breathe to correctly produce the idiomatic expression of the English language. It was not until after this fact had become clear to my mind that I began to extract from my organs of speech those sounds which appear so abnormally different and "strange" to the ear of the bewildered foreigner, who finds himself completely at a loss how to produce them. The better he becomes acquainted with the language, the more thoroughly he becomes convinced of the fact that his mode of speaking English is different from that of the native-born. Nor will a German _ever_ succeed in speaking English as it should be spoken until he succeeds in _reversing_ his mode of breathing. He must go straight to the antipodes in sound production; he must stand on his head, so to say, instead of on his feet. I shall fully explain what this means later on.