DIALOGUES FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES BY JOHN STUART BLACKIE PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH London and New York: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1871. 3.04.9.19. [All Rights reserved.] PREFACE. WHEN I had the honour-now about thirty years ago-of being appointed to the Chair of Humanity in the University of Aberdeen, a city then, and still, famous for the excellency of its Latin scholarship, I had not been many weeks employed in the discharge of my new functions when I became aware of certain very glaring perversities and absurdities which had grown up, like tares among the wheat, in connexion with an otherwise admirable system of training. Of these perversities the following were the most prominent. In the first place, the young Latinists had been taught, with a great amount of labour, a system of rules about the pronunciation of words to which they systematically gave the lie whenever they opened their mouths. of these rules, for instance, I recollect, commenced thus -for they were in Latin-"os produc❞—which was meant to inculcate the doctrine that in the Latin language, when a word ends with the syllable os, the vowel in that syllable, like a long note in music, is pronounced with a prolongation of the voice, as when we say in English the Pope, and not the Popp, hōpe, One |