The following discussion grew out of my attempt to fulfill a request from the Editor of Language to review the late R. H. Stetson's Motor phonetics: A study of speech movements in action, 2d edition (pp. xi, 212, with 122 figures in the text; Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company [for Oberlin College], 1951), hereafter referred to as Mot. Phon. The routine reviewing procedures did not work out. Much of Stetson's material seemed unlikely to interest readers of Language; many matters which might interest them, and which Stetson's topic might seem to bear on, are either not discussed at all or are only obliquely hinted at in Mot. Phon. Further, Stetson's expository style, with its idiosyncratic terminology, its peculiar structure of repetitions and unsignaled transitions, its unlabeled analogies, its mixture of polemic and report, requires a paraphrase before discussion.