Such would be the case with me should any material acknowledgment come to me now, having of late attained to the leisure I had so much longed for, thanks to my previous labor and a brave son's devotion and valued aid and assistance. No man, however, will ever know how long I have been kept under the ban of purely materialistic endeavors, while these higher things were occupying my mind and clamoring for recognition. A sum equal to that representing a single day's expenditure for _falsely_ teaching matters connected with the voice, alone, the world over, not to speak of other matters of still greater importance, would have sufficed for a number of years, if not for a lifetime, to place me in a position to devote myself exclusively to the exposition of the correct principles underlying these important subjects. As it has been with me, no doubt it is and always has been with many others in different fields of research. Since the publication of my previous book, I have had four years of continuous experience, during which the statements therein made have been strengthened and enlarged, so that I am now ready to support them with an endless array of proof. That book, however, was the beginning of what some day will be regarded as a greater movement in the right direction than any previous one, for attaining an insight into nature's occult work in creating, developing, and sustaining the living organism, and the exercise of its faculties and functions, more especially _man's_ faculties and functions. The subject, however, is of so subtle a nature that it cannot be treated like a mathematical problem or a chemical analysis; still, I shall do the best I can with such means as are at my command. Recently an acquaintance who is interested in vocal culture asked me how I was getting along, and I answered, telling him something like what I have said in the preceding. He replied: "That is the trouble with you Germans. This is a live world, a practical world; we want facts, results--something we can turn to account and make use of." This impatience (and who can blame those who are suffering, or those who, being young and talented, want to be led into the right path) throws the door wide open to all kinds of charlatanism--charlatanism which is honest and charlatanism which is dishonest, the former, being more readily trusted, often working the greater harm. The best teaching for the present, in default of a science, is that which is based simply on experience; the pseudo-science now being taught being worse than no science at all. While the exercise of speech is next to universal with all men, no one has any idea of _how_ it is exercised; the wisest being as much in the dark as the least informed. This is what so eminent a man as Oliver Wendell Holmes had to say on the subject in one of his lectures, delivered not many years before his death: