26 PLANT NAMES 



'* she." I have no doubt that if the sailors and 

 engine-drivers were women, they would call them 

 " he." This is all very well in poetry and colloquial 

 talk, but in scientific nomenclature it is wholly 

 absurd and mischievous. 



But no old language is properly constructed. 

 Languages were not made by a committee of lin- 

 guistic experts on scientific principles. They grew 

 up through long ages in the mouths of ignorant, 

 careless, and indolent people, peasants and traders, 

 and all languages, living and dead, are filled with 

 illogical absurdities and inconsistencies. That is 

 what makes them difficult. There is but one pro- 

 perly constructed language in the world — Esperanto. 

 It was created by a man of genius who knew what 

 he was about. It is beautiful, precise, and expres- 

 sive. Its grammatical rules, which are few and 

 simple, have no exceptions, and there are no irregular 

 forms. It is consequently extraordinarily easy to 

 learn. And, as we might expect, it has no foohsh 

 distinctions of gender apart from sex. The English 

 language, too, is superior to most others in this 

 respect. We may call the sun and moon " he " and 

 " she " if we are in a poetical mood, but a German is 

 forced to do so as the Greeks and Romans were, 

 only he makes the sun '' she " and the moon "he." 

 And in plant names the student has to burden his 

 memory with the fact, for which there is no reason, 

 that a tree in Greek, dendron, is neuter, while in 

 Latin, arhor, it is feminine. And he is obliged to 

 make the qualifying adjective agree with it. A tall 



