Another notable agreement in the British, French and German Hydrographic Office systems is found in their declarations in regard to diacritical marks in the writing of foreign geographic names. The British say that a system which would attempt to represent the more delicate inflections of sound and accent would become so complicated as to defeat itself. They therefore recommend only the use of the acute accent to denote the syllable on which stress should be laid. The German Hydrographic Office has adopted the same view. The French Commission in its deliberations expressed decided opposition to the adoption of Lepsius' or any similar system, and finally adopted besides the "_tilde_" and "_créma_," only the accent "_circonflex_" and the "_apostrophe_," signs of which the two last are ordinarily employed in the writing of the French language. "In our country," the French commission says, "a native of the Normandy and one of the Provence do not employ exactly the same sounds in pronouncing, for instance, Marseille, Enghien, or Montrichard, and, in foreign lands, we find still greater diversity in this respect." Therefore, we should use diacritical marks with the greatest economy, and only when they are indispensable. It is of course not to be expected that a certain school of geographers, who are in favor of the strict application to geographic names of a simplified form of Lepsius' standard alphabet, will acquiesce in this view, but it is to be hoped that all practical minded geographers will agree to reserve the extended use of diacritical alphabets for purely linguistic literature only. In the meanwhile, the United States has not been idle, and the Hydrographer, Captain Henry F. Picking, U. S. N., has taken the initiative by the appointment of a board to consider and report a system of orthography for foreign geographic names for guidance in the compilation of the Hydrographic Office charts, sailing directions and notices to mariners, which as we know cover all parts of the world. The Hydrographic Office, by its daily experience with the subject matter, is thus peculiarly fitted to inaugurate a reform, and it is hoped that the board, profiting by what the British, French and Germans have already done, will report rules, that may become generally satisfactory to American geographers.