These studies—I need scarcely add that they are comparative ones—are of interest for various reasons. They lead up to new ideas of grammar and of language, and furnish arguments for a reform in orthography of which M. Bourdon is a very warm partisan. His readers will not be slow to notice for the matter of that, that he is in regard to this frankly revolutionary; and it may seem paradoxical to say to them, for example, that “the distinction between analytical and synthetical languages is absolutely artificial, and could only be produced through our bad systems of writing.” Writing, M. Bourdon indeed remarks, introduces separations in places where spoken language makes no pause. The English write _I will go_, they pronounce it _Iwillgo_. The analysis which pertains to writing masks the true cohesion of the spoken language, and “if in the past all series of articulations had been written as a single word which were in fact pronounced as a single word, we should not have known the error which consists in opposing certain languages classed as synthetical to others which we class as analytical.” The argument is perhaps not a decisive one, and in the neo-Latin languages, for example, one can scarcely deny that the analysis of the written language has conformed to the work of decomposition of the antique forms, so as to adapt itself to the new groupings of their essential elements, groupings wherein these elements remain variable because speech separates them effectively, in many cases by interpolating governing words or others. But it is not my intention to enter into these detailed discussions. I leave M. Bourdon in further calling attention to his last chapter, _Ecriture_. Persons curious as to graphology will find in it some good ideas concerning this method of “character reading.” The author does not tell everything, and I have a suspicion that he greatly despises certain signs valued by the graphologists, and arrived at empirically, but we should note what he has actually said. * * * * *