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noted as preferable, are not free from objection, and should be avoided when it can be done.

Webster allows discrep-ancy; Worcester prints the word as discre-pancy. English printers divide father and mo-ther as is here shown, but American printers render the words as fa-ther and moth-er.

DIVISIONS MAKE COMPOSITION EXPENSIVE

The rule that words must be divided on syllables compels a very great waste of time. At least once every hour (and five or more times an hour if the measure is narrow) the compositor has to pause and think before he decides the question, Shall I divide on this or on that letter? He may decide wrongly, and be required by the proof-reader to divide on another syllable and to overrun many lines. The author may overrule the proof-reader and divide in a third way. The time wasted in overrunning and respacing lines to avoid divisions objected to by proof-reader and author is a serious tax upon the cost of composition-not less in the aggregate than one fifth the cost of type-setting alone. To correct the supposed fault words may have to be spaced wide in one line and close in the next line, to a much greater disfigurement of the composition.

Are the rules now in force for dividing words in syllables really needed in printing? A book is

supposed to be written for the convenience of the reader, and not to illustrate the author's scientific knowledge of the derivation and proper dissection of words derived from foreign languages. The reader is helped to a better understanding of the subject when the division of the word in the first line more clearly suggests the pronunciation (not the derivation) of the part following in the next line.

Efforts to help or educate the reader have been made often in a wrong direction. Before typog raphy had been introduced, and for about twenty years after its invention, all books were written or printed as type-writing is now done, with a ragged outline at the right. This was unavoidable, for the early printers did not have spaces of different widths. There are improvers of typography in our own time who revive this old method, regardless of its raggedness, and to some extent of the correct division of words. In the chap-book style for the display of title-pages it is permissible to omit the hyphen in a divided word at the end of a full line, and there are other practitioners of this style who divide the word on any letter, regardless of the syllable, and require the reader to join the broken word without the suggestion made by the hyphen.

For more than three centuries printers of books appended at the foot of every page the first word or syllable of the next page. This catchword was supposed to be needed by the reader to make clear

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the connection between the two pages; but the catchword is now out of use, and it is not missed. It may be that the reader of the future will have a similar opinion of the present method of dividing words on syllables only. A feeble resistance against the tyranny of the rule has already been made by some amateurs in printing. If, to prevent bad spacing, it is proper to divide a word like George on the o (as it here appears) in the large type of the displayed lines of the so-called artistic title-page, why is it not proper to repeat the practice in the small type of the text of the same book? Is a division on two letters, or even on one letter,1 as offensive as a wide spacing of words in one line and their narrow spacing in the line following? It is not probable that this innovation will find favor with the critical, but it may be mentioned as an exhibit of increasing restiveness at grammatical and typographical shackles which annoy the reader and do not help and do hinder the proper rendering of printed words.

Beadnell, Wilson, Bigelow, Drew, and Teall have written on the division of words much that may be read with advantage by every compositor; but these writers admit that printed words can be, and

1 Not much attention seems to have been paid to a systematic division of words even by good printers of the eighteenth century. In Baskerville's edition of Paradise Lost, I find these

divisions in the preface by Milton: e-specially and o-therwise, and they appear in lines where there was no real need for a division of these long words on the single letter.

often must be, arranged in ways that compel the violation of their rules. Yet rules cannot be entirely abrogated. The good compositor should understand the theory as well as the practice of making syllables; but his acquired knowledge of the elementary principles of etymology and his memorizing of fixed rules will not prove so serviceable in every-day work as a knowledge of correct pronunciation. Much as the writer dislikes clippings and abbreviations in a text, he would not hesitate to render though as tho' at the end of a line in which it would be impossible to crowd the three following letters of the word.

The occasional reprinting in a foreign language of sentences, sometimes in the form of entire paragraphs, calls for the division of words by a compositor who knows nothing of the structure or the true pronunciation of the words. The remarks in Appendices B, C, and D, prepared by an author who has had the technical education of a printer and long experience as an editor, will be found of material service in the composition of French, Italian, and German.

The rules for the division of words in Spanish have been copied, in Appendix E, from Knapp's Spanish Grammar, by permission of the publishers, Messrs. Ginn & Co.

A

SMALL CAPITALS

WRITER'S desire for small capitals in print is indicated in manuscript by underscoring the specified words with two lines. For purposes of emphasis or display the small capitals have been rated as superior to italic, but this superiority is not apparent. In regular fonts the small capitals are no taller than the round letters of the lowercase, are on a narrower set and usually of a lighter face, and are obscured by more connecting lines. In many fonts they are really the weakest and least distinct of the five correlated series (roman capitals, lower-case, and small capitals, italic capitals and lower-case) furnished as a complete font of book type. For this reason small capitals are seldom selected for any division of the book for which more distinctness or emphasis is desired.