BELL, ALEXANDER MELVILLE Ameri can educationalist, was born at Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 1, 1819. He studied under and became the principal assistant of his father, Alexander Bell, an authority on phonetics and defective speech. From 1843 to 1865 he lectured on elocution at the Uni versity of Edinburgh, and from 1865 to 1870 at the University of London. In 1868, and again in 1870 and 1871, he lectured in the Lowell Institute course in Boston. In 1870 he became a lec turer on philology at Queen's College, Kingston, Ont. ; and in he removed to Washington, D.C., where he devoted himself to the education of deaf mutes by the "visible speech" method of or thoepy, in which the alphabetical characters of his own invention were graphic diagrams of positions and motions of the organs of speech. He held high rank as an authority on physiological phon etics and was author of numerous works on orthoepy, elocution and education, among which were Steno-Phonography (1852) ; Letters and Sounds (1858) ; Principles of Speech and Dictionary of Sounds (1863) ; Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics (1867) ; Sounds and their Relations (1881) ; A Popu lar Manual of Visible Speech and Vocal Physiology (1889) ; The Science of Speech, (189 7) ; The Fundamentals of Elocution See John Hitz, Alexander Melville Bell (Washington, 1906) .