The Debats has produced some curious statistics of the amount
of stammering among the French people, as proved by the rejec- tions for the Army on that plea. There are now about 1,000 rejections per annum for stammering, and it is calculated that 125 persons in every 130,000 of the population stammer. Stam- mering is more common in the south than in the north, rising nearly as high as 15 in every thousand in the Basses Alpes and Bouches du Rhone, while in the Department of the llaut Rhin the proportion is only •03 per 1,000. The difference is attri- buted to the fact that education is more widespread, and pronunciation more carefully studied, in the North than in the South of France ; but is it not more likely that it is owing to a greater excitability of the nervous system ? Stammering is not, like lisping,—which, by the way, seems to be commoner amongst the higher orders than amongst the ignorant, —a mere defect of mechanical utterance ; it is immensely heightened by anything which excites the nervous system, and (like aphasia) is apt to disappear altogether in all involuntary ejacu- lations. Among the English middle-class at least, we should say that the slow stammering which comes of want of nervous force, is decidedly less common than the more serious kind of stammering which comes of a certain affluence and even superabundance of nervous force,—such stammering as Charles Lamb's.
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