62 INTEKNATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



mathematical thought in a manner which is internationally 

 intelligible, that is, intelligible to those who are acquainted 

 with the science and its symbols. For a considerable time 

 Professor Peano, in Turin, has been publishing works written 

 in this manner. We perceive here the realisation of the 

 ideal of a purely ideographic language, which can be read by 

 the specialist without his requiring to translate it into the 

 words of any particular form of speech. 



To quote a similar example from chemistry, J. H. van't 

 Hoff, in one of the publications of his youth, avoided assign- 

 ing names to the chemical substances with which he dealt, con- 

 sidering that his meaning would be much better conveyed by 

 the corresponding structural formulae. Such a text would be 

 quite intelligible to a trained chemist without the formulae 

 calling up in his mind any particular words, indeed without 

 any such words existing at all. 



These well-known facts show that the problem of an inter- 

 national language has already been partly solved in science. 

 In so far as definite and fairly stable concepts have been 

 formed in science, they may be designated by arbitrary 

 symbols, which may if necessary be universally accepted and 

 understood. Hitherto such symbols have been mainly 

 employed for reading, that is to say intended for the eye, and 

 not for the voice and ear. For example, in different 

 languages quite different sounds are assigned to the 

 numerals, so that, whilst the written symbols are universally 

 intelligible, the spoken ones are not. 



However, there are a considerable number of exceptions to 

 this statement. The word integral is quite as international 

 as the symbol j and the chemical symbol Tl is pronounced 

 everywhere thallium, or something very like it. On looking 

 through the table of the chemical elements one finds that 

 more than two-thirds of the names possess similar sounds in 

 the chief languages. Differences occur only in the case of 

 the well-known elements, where the words employed in daily 



