Aside from the ordinary facilities requisite for learning or teaching the art, there are three absolute necessities to a practical system of short-hand writing. They are: speed, legibility, and an almost entire absence of arbitrary rules and characters.

Without the latter, years-long years-of hard study and harder practice, combined with an exceedingly retentive memory, is the price the learner pays for his skill. Hence, it is simply fallacious to acquire stenography, an art that is wholly arbitrary in its character, and even though it may be arranged by a modern author, is as antiquated as many Indian relics, and bears the same relation to phonography that the olden time scythe bears to the latest improved mowing machine.

Without speed, vebatim reporting is, of course, impossible; therefore it is equally a waste of time to learn any old-style phonography, which though easily read when written, makes very few rapid writers and only of those students who are willing to give many years to the closest practice.

Without legibility, however, even speed is of no avail. The student should, therefore, be on his guard against a phonography which gives enough speed to keep pace with the whirlwind, but which, to obtain this speed, uses such an extended array of contractions, necessitating special dictionaries and phrase books, that ease in reading one's notes becomes a secondary consideration. Better, far better, be able to report little, and correctly transcribe that little, than to jot down with electrical rapidity, the utterances of the swiftest speaker, and afterwards to be uncertain of the accuracy of one's transcription.

The author is not cognizant of the existence of a method of shorthand writing, previous to the publication of this Practical Phonography, that is not deficient in one or more of the above mentioned respects. Here, it may be asked,-How is it, then, that before the advent of Practical Phonography, there were professional short-hand writers, who were and are both accurate and rapid? To this, it must be said, with truth, that, as with members of other professions, these talented and skilled ones are not at all numerous, and it is questionable if any of them write other than an adulterated phonography, founded, doubtless, upon one system, but interpolated afterwards with scraps of other phonographies and the phonographer's own particular contractions for particular kinds of work. This ultimatum has been a necessity, heretofore, among those who would become experts, without wasting the best portion of their time for years, in dull, monotonous practice. It was to bring order out of that phonographic chaos, which brought Practical Phonography into being; and the author has every reason to believe that he has succeeded in accomplishing his purpose. Practical Phonography is more free from arbitrary characters than any other known system of phonography, contains the elements of greater speed* with less practice, and is as easily read as the most legible: thereby combining the necessary virtues of all its predecessors without being shackled with any of their bad qualities.