as well as to show of the consonants that the mutes and liquids form correspondents in regular pairs, he presents a scheme which I abbreviate as follows.  VOWELS:  1. A, as in _=all_ and wh~at, or o, as in orifice and n~ot; 2. U—­=urn and h~ut, or l=ove and c~ome; 3. O—­v=ote and ech~o; 4. A—­=ah and h~at; 5. A—­h=azy, no short sound; 6. E—­=e=el and it; 7. E—­m=ercy and m~et; 8. O—­pr=ove and ad~o; 9. OO—­t=o=ol and f~o~ot; 10. W—­vo=w and la~w; 11. Y—­(like the first e—­) s=yntax and dut~y.  DIPHTHONGS:  1. I—­as ah-ee; 2. U—­as ee-oo; 3. OU—­as au-oo.  CONSONANTS:  1.  Mutes,—­c or s, f, h, k or q, p, t, th sharp, sh; 2.  Liquids,—­l, which has no corresponding mute, and z, v, r, ng, m, n, th flat and j, which severally correspond to the eight mutes in their order; 3.  Subliquids,—­g hard, b, and d.  See “Music of Nature,” by William Gardiner, p. 480, and after.

OBS. 13.—­Dr. Rush comes to the explanation of the powers of the letters as the confident first revealer of nature’s management and wisdom; and hopes to have laid the foundation of a system of instruction in reading and oratory, which, if adopted and perfected, “will beget a similarity of opinion and practice,” and “be found to possess an excellence which must grow into sure and irreversible favour.”—­Phil. of the Voice, p. 404.  “We have been willing,” he says, “to believe, on faith alone, that nature is wise in the contrivance of speech.  Let us now show, by our works of analysis, how she manages the simple elements of the voice, in the production of their unbounded combinations.”—­Ibid., p. 44.  Again:  “Every one, with peculiar self-satisfaction, thinks he reads well, and yet all read differently:  there is, however, but one mode of reading well.”—­Ib., p. 403.  That one mode, some say, his philosophy alone teaches.  Of that, others may judge.  I shall only notice here what seems to be his fundamental position, that, on all the vocal elements of language, nature has stamped duplicity.  To establish this extraordinary doctrine, he first attempts to prove, that “the letter a, as heard in the word day,” combines two distinguishable yet inseparable sounds; that it is a compound of what he calls, with reference to vowels and syllables in general, “the radical and the vanishing movement of the voice,”—­a single and indivisible element in which “two sounds are heard continuously successive,” the sounds of a and e as in ale and eve.  He does not know that some grammarians have contended that ay in day is a proper diphthong, in which both the vowels are heard; but, so pronouncing it himself, infers from the experiment, that there is no simpler sound of the vowel a.  If this inference is not wrong, the word shape is to be pronounced sha-epe; and, in like manner, a multitude of other words will acquire a new element not commonly heard in them.