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Today, just as twenty y~ars ago, many linguists would be tempted to agree unreservedly with Leonard Bloomfield that 'the causes of sound-change are unknown. l Not a few would infer from this statement that any research aimed at determining such causes is inevitably doomed to failure. Scholars who regard linguistics, primarily and even exclusively, as a descriptive discipline both on the synchronic plane and in evolutionary matters 'will most naturally be tempted to favor these views since they afford a justification for their reluctance to go beyond mere statements of directly obsernble facts, such as 'English p and b are clistinct phonemes' or 'French u ([uJ) corresponds to Latin u'. The modern followers of'the neogrammarians who are ready to reckon with mutual influence IN THE SPO~ CHAIN, but who ignore and would deny the fact that the nature of a given phoneme depends on that of its neighbors IN THE PATrERN will find themselves-in agreement with those phonemicists who conceive of 'structure' as resulting from combinatory latitudes of distinctive units in the chain rather than as based upon the latter's partial phonic identities and differences. Whoever sees in a phonemic pattern nothing but a convenient way of summarizing the behavior of segments in the utterance is hardly prepared to conceive of it as a dynamic realit.y. The componential analysis of phonemes which is the first step toward the setting up of a pattern based upon phonic identities a~d differences is still often looked upon as an amusing but impractical refinement of more traditional methods, and its wide implications are rarely perceived. Yet it is felt by an increaslng number of structurally minded linguists2 that it paves the way toward a better understanding of phonetic evolution. What would seem to prevent a general acceptance of diachronic phonemics as a legit'imate cliscipline is not only the wide-spread feeling that linguistics would jeopardize its hard-won. scientific character by venturing beyond the limits of pure description, but also an irrational conviction that there should be one and only one answer to the question: Why do sounds change? and that a principle of explanation which can be shown not to account in toto for any change chosen at random is ipso facto to. be rejected as invalid. This conviction