i54 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ing, clumsy stupidity of the present language situation. A good 

 half dozen languages at least, must become the working tools 

 of him who conducts scientific research of any importance; for 

 men all over the civilized globe are carrying on investigations 

 in all the departments of science, and their results are being 

 published in hundreds of scientific journals in many tongues. 

 To be sure, reviewers having special acquaintance with the less 

 known languages translate many of these investigations — or, at least, 

 more or less imperfectly report their main features in the journals 

 of science published in German, French, Italian and English, which 

 all scientific men are supposed to read. It goes without saying, how- 

 ever, that hundreds of valuable papers are buried each year in the 

 minor languages and dialects, while even in the four great European 

 tongues much of importance is overlooked by reviewers in the others. 

 The situation is even worse when an international congress is con- 

 vened. Such meetings are being held with increasing frequency — 

 twenty-two in Geneva, Switzerland, last summer — to consider all 

 topics of common human interest : Medicine, prison reform, agri- 

 culture, peace, the Eed Cross, sanitation, education, besides the special 

 societies for all the great branches of science. At present it is the 

 universal rule that at all such gatherings papers may be read and 

 discussions conducted in any one of the four languages above men- 

 tioned. There are always some, often many, who can understand 

 formal papers, if read very slowly, fairly well in at least two of 

 these idioms. But to converse freely, easily and continuously with 

 others upon all topics of common interest in another than one's own 

 native tongue is a feat more often imagined than realized. 



In view of the amazing progress we are daily achieving in all the 

 other departments of human life, why, with respect to the one in- 

 dispensable tool of language, should the human race suffer no im- 

 provement? Why not agree upon one auxiliary common language, 

 which all people of moderate education may easily learn. Why must 

 the Magyar or the Slav, the Chinese or the Japanese, of culture and 

 intelligence, be barred by language from the tremendous world of 

 thought in the intellectual life-centers of the globe? In the to-morrow 

 that is coming, shall we exclude ourselves from Eussian, Chinese or 

 Japanese life and thought, as much as they to-day are excluded from 

 ours, except at the expense of laborious language-learning. But 

 consider for a moment the situation confronting, let us say, a culti- 

 vated Japanese desirous of entering European thought. First, Greek 

 and Latin ought to be acquired, and English, French and German 

 absolutely must be mastered, every one of them absolutely alien to 

 his own tongue in grammar and vocabulary, and even in the very 

 written signs themselves. 



It is one thing to engage in the study of foreign languages with 



