January 24, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



133 



nues of commerce. It is not so witli the 

 standards of speech. The nation debases 

 its language with slang, with hybrid and 

 foreign words, the impure alloys and the 

 cheap imports of its verbal coinage, mere 

 tokens which should not be legal tender on 

 the intellectual exchanges. France has an 

 academy which in these matters has much 

 of the authority given to the Mint, whose 

 assayers test our metal coins; but in our 

 country the mintage of words is wholly 

 unrestricted, and, as a consequence, the 

 English language, circulating as it does to 

 all the four corners of the globe, has re- 

 ceived an admixture of fragments of 

 speech taken from various languages, just 

 as the currency with which one is paid at 

 the frontier, where empires meet, includes 

 the coinage of several governments, each of 

 which passes with an equally liberal care- 

 lessness. 



Science ignores geographical lines and 

 bemoans the babel of tongues which hin- 

 ders the free interchange of ideas between 

 all the peoples of the earth. Nevertheless, 

 the international character of technical 

 literature is suggested by the fact that 

 three languages, French, German and 

 English, are practically recognized as the 

 standard mediums of intellectual exchange. 

 One of these aft'ords the most lucid solvent 

 of thought, another is the speech of the 

 most philosophical of European people and 

 the third goes with world-wide dominion, 

 so that each has a claim to become the 

 recognized language of science. The 

 brotherhood of thinking men will have 

 been fully recognized when all agree to 

 employ the same tongue in their inter- 

 coui'se, but such a ' far-off divine event ' 

 is not within the probabilities of the pres- 

 ent, consequently there remains only for 

 us to make the best of our own particular 

 language and to safeguard its purity, so 

 that when it goes abroad the people of 

 other countries may at least be assured 



that they are not dealing with the debased 

 currency of speech. 



Barrie has remarked that in this age the 

 man of science appears to be the only one 

 who has anything to say— and the only one 

 who does not know how to say it. It is 

 far otherwise in politics, an occupation 

 which numbers among its followers a great 

 many persons who have the ability for 

 speaking far beyond anything worth the 

 saying that they have to say. Nor is it so 

 in the arts, the high priests of which, ac- 

 cording to Huxley, have ' the power of ex- 

 pression so cultivated that their sensual 

 caterwauling may be almost mistaken for 

 the music of the spheres.' In science there 

 is a language as of coded telegrams, by the 

 use of which a limited amount of informa- 

 tion is conveyed through the medium of 

 six-syllabled words. Even when not thus 

 overburdened with technical terms it is 

 too often the case that scientific concep- 

 tions are conveyed in a raw and unpala- 

 table form, mere indigestible chunks of 

 knowledge, as it were, which are apt to 

 provoke mental dyspepsia. Why, I ask, 

 should the standard English prose of the 

 day be a chastened art and the writing of 

 science, in a great scientific era, merely an 

 unkempt dressing of splendid ideas? The 

 luminous expositions of Huxley, the occa- 

 sional irradiating imagery of Tyndall, the 

 manly speech of Le Conte, and of a very 

 few others, all serve simply to emphasize 

 the fact that the literature of scientific re- 

 search as a whole is characterized by a flat 

 and iingainly style, which renders it dis- 

 tasteful to all but those who have a great 

 hunger for learning. 



To criticism of this sort the profession- 

 al scientist can reply that he addresses 

 liimself not to the public at large, but to 

 those who are themselves engaged in simi- 

 lar research, and he may be prompted to 

 add to this the further statement that he 

 cannot pitch the tone of his teaching so as 



