8 INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



How would it be if this difficulty had been already over- 

 come, and the intermediary language already created and 

 proved to be serviceable ? 



" But that would amount to adding a new language to be 

 learnt to the ones we already have to learn ; there would be 

 no advantage in that ! " 



If, however, this " new " language was really not " new," 

 consisting mostly of words known to every educated person ; 

 if its grammar was so simple that its principles could be 

 learned within an hour ; and if, therefore, any educated 

 person who knew a single Romance language could learn the 

 whole language in an incredibly short time, would it not be 

 an advantage to acquire it ? 



To prove this is a simple problem of permutations and 

 combinations, and the proof possesses all the certainty of 

 mathematical reasoning. We shall demonstrate that by an 

 example. 



Suppose a large town contains ten districts, each possess- 

 ing a pneumatic post-office. In order to connect each district 

 with all the others, one could lay from each of the ten post- 

 offices nine tubes to the remaining nine post-offices. That 



10 X 9 

 would require = 45 tubes. The problem could, 



however, be solved much more easily and cheaply by con- 

 necting each of the post-offices by means of a single tube 

 with a central post-office, which would receive and distribute 

 all the letters, as is actually the case in practice. We 

 should then require only ten tubes. 



Substitute now for the districts imagined above the 

 languages, German, French, English, Italian, Russian, 

 Spanish, etc., with the condition that every person speaking 

 one language should be able to correspond with everybody 

 speaking a different language. In the case of ten languages 

 we should require for every correspondent nine dictionaries, 

 or altogether ninety dictionaries. 



