The story of Demosthenes and the pebbles is familiar.  Less familiar, we venture to say, is the theory that declamation is sometimes the cause of stammering; or, rather, that stuttering impels a man to talkativeness, and the yielding to this tendency fixes the habit of stammering and makes it worse.  Hence it might plausibly be argued that it is the rostrum, or the very emotion of speaking in public, which makes some orators become stammerers.  At all events, in Paris an institution has been founded expressly to remedy stuttering; and M. Chervin, its director, not long ago presented before a meeting of the learned societies at the Sorbonne some interesting statistics on his specialty.  These statistics seem to show that stuttering is in direct proportion with the habit of speaking, and that the more one speaks the more one stutters.  This is certainly an unexpected result of the restoration of freedom of speech in France.  M. Chervin mentions a village of eighteen hundred souls where everybody, without exception, undeniably stutters.  What strange dialogues, says Jules Claretie (who cites these points in l’Independance Belge), must take place there!  A very curious fact is, that stammering is less frequent in the north of France than in the south.  In the north-east it is least known, and most in the south-east.  For example, all things being equal, for six stammerers in Paris there would be twenty-five in Lyons and seventy in Marseilles.  The admitted garrulity or fluency of southern speaking is often the cause or the preface to stammering.  Thus, comically concludes M. Claretie, oratorical habits threaten to make stammering become the order of the day, and for one Vergniaud there will be ten stutterers, and ten more stutterers for one General Foy.  Nevertheless, in earlier days, Camille Desmoulins stammered, and yet spoke but little at the Convention.  It does not appear that Charles Lamb was a garrulous person, and in the familiar experience of daily life we rarely find stutterers to be rapid talkers.  Still, this latter fact really helps M. Chervin’s theory, since we may conclude it is precisely because stammerers find that a very rapid utterance increases their defect that they force themselves to speak deliberately, and also not to tire the vocal muscles.  Hence, apart from the jesting inference which M. Claretie, in French journalist’s fashion, is bent son twisting out of the scientific statistics, there would appear to be a mutual influence, perfectly comprehensible, of rapidity in utterance and a tendency to stammering.  We could not safely go on to generalize that only voluble people become stutterers, or that all stutterers are unusually garrulous and unusually eager in enunciation; but we may conclude that if they are thus careless and rattling in delivery, their peculiarity will be likely to grow more marked, and that accordingly a natural tendency to the same defect is developed by the same habits or necessities of much and rapid talking.