92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of this fact. The " Cologne Gazette," for instance, used to publish 

 the periodical advertisement of a German who undoubtedly prided 

 himself on his English. Desiring to obtain some English boarders, he 

 wound up with this remark, " The diet is notorious and unlimited." 

 What he really meant was that he set a good table, and there was 

 plenty to eat. It is this kind of modern language which some writers 

 evidently mean when they speak of the facility with which transla- 

 tions from modern languages can be made. Let us suppose there 

 were no prejudice against the modern languages, and none in favor of 

 Greek, what would happen ? The medical faculties would, no doubt, 

 advise their students to avail themselves of every opportunity to ob- 

 tain a good knowledge of the three languages in which the chief re- 

 sults of modern civilization are recorded. But to do this with a rea- 

 sonable chance of success, such students must be allowed the necessary 

 time. They can not find this time for the modern languages as long as 

 the college compels them to devote it to the ancient. To measure fairly 

 the disciplinary value of such a language as English is not an easy 

 matter. Take, for instance, the choice of synonyms. Soup and 

 broth seem to mean the same thing, at least in poetry, and yet the 

 poet may want to use the one in a place where he could not use the 

 other. An English gentleman spent an evening in Venice at the the- 

 atre. The piece repi-esented was an Italian version of " JVIacbeth." 

 In the course of the play our Englishman heard the expression, "Po- 

 lenta infernale," which he mentally translated into "infernal soup," 

 without being able to recall the original passage. Having returned 

 to the hotel, his first care was to examine the English work, when he 

 was delighted to find that the immortal bard, far from using the 

 shocking " infernal soup," mentioned only the comparatively harmless 

 " hell-broth." 



Whoever has consulted a dictionary of synonyms in the English, 

 German, or French language, will receive with some doubt the asser- 

 tion that the ancient languages are richer in this respect than the 

 modern. The celebrated historian, Guizot, devoted many years to a dic- 

 tionary of French synonyms, which contains over eight hundred pages. 

 The astonishing wealth of the German vocabulary is well known, and 

 the philosophical spirit of the nation has introduced such a great 

 number of the nicest shades of expression that a translation from the 

 German, in order to be good, requires an extraordinary effort. 



" Traduttore traditore,^'' say the Italians. " A translator, a trai- 

 tor." Not necessarily. There are translations and translations, but, 

 after all, to translate fluently from one language into another is not 

 the real object of language-study. Unless a student reads a foreign 

 language as he docs his own, he has not mastered it, but to gain this 

 ability is a far more serious undertaking than is commonly believed. 



Be this as it may, it is at least certain that a doctor of medicine, 

 or a candidate for the degree, should have an ordinary knowledge of 



