566 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



pupils were taught to speak and to write the language, to use it in the 

 affairs of every-day life. It was not only the Latin of books, but of the 

 playground, of the street, of public discussion. While it was not the 

 speech of the common people, it was the general medium of correspond- 

 ence, of law and of diplomacy, until superseded by French. One needs- 

 but to read the letters of Erasmus or the Letters of Obscure Men to see 

 what a facile medium of expression it was. How easily a foreign lan- 

 guage may be acquired is daily demonstrated in the public schools of 

 our large cities. The children of the immigrants who come into this 

 country by tens of thousands from all parts of the world usually learn 

 English, to them a foreign tongue, in a year or less. "Were it not so 

 common the phenomenon would be called marvelous. Children do not 

 employ the principle of association; they simply yield to the natural 

 instinct to imitate. Unconsciously they strive to reproduce speech- 

 sounds until they get them to conform to those they hear uttered in 

 their presence. When they begin to talk, usually in the second year,, 

 their enunciation and pronunciation are very defective. But by con- 

 stant though unconscious effort they approximate more and more nearly 

 to the correct sounds until they attain complete conformity. When 

 they are engaged in learning two or three languages at the same time 

 they rarely confound them. They usually answer in the language in 

 which they are addressed. Children under favorable conditions before 

 they are old enough to attend school learn a list of some thousand of 

 words without knowing how. Their vocabulary grows faster than their 

 minds. It is easier for them to learn the words that designate common 

 things in two or three languages than to comprehend an unfamiliar 

 idea. After the age of mental maturity the task becomes more and 

 more difficult and is rarely accomplished correctly. There are, however,, 

 here and there persons who can, by an effort, reproduce any speech- 

 sound they hear, as long as their auditory apparatus is unimpaired. 



Contrary to the popular belief, the ability to speak several languages 

 is not a mark of mental power. It merely indicates a retentive memory 

 of a certain kind and a knack for imitating sounds. Sir Eichard Bur- 

 ton relates in one of his books that once when near Jeddah he was 

 accosted by a man in Turkish. Getting no response, he tried Persian ; 

 then the same silence made him try Arabic. When his listener still 

 kept silent he grumbled out his astonishment in Hindustani. That 

 also failing, he tried in succession Pushtu, Armenian, English, French 

 and Italian. When Burton could no longer restrain his risibilities, he 

 admitted his nationality and chatted for some time with the stranger 

 in English, which he spoke very well. Professor Starr says in his 

 " The Truth about the Congo " that members of the Bantu tribes are 

 often met with who speak several languages readily. A recent denom- 

 inational periodical gives the names of several men who preach in four 

 different languages and a larger number in three. One clergyman is 



