l82 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XI. No. 271 



to American thinkers. Professor Ward's address, like every thing 

 that he writes, was very compact, and showed an intimate acquaint- 

 ance with the history of the struggle of the doctrine of evolution 

 for recognition in this country, and of the honorable part Dr. Gray 

 took in it. Dr. C. V. Riley, who was the last speaker, dealt with 

 Dr. Gray as a man. His address was an eloquent tribute to the 

 memory of one of the most delightful men he had ever known, and 

 its interest was heightened by the relation of circumstances con- 

 nected with Dr. Gray's visit to Europe last summer. Especially 

 touching was his description of Dr. Gray's reception in the meeting 

 of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. 

 Gray, who was one of the regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 

 had many very close friends among the scientific men of Washing- 

 ton, who mourn him more as a father or a brother than as a fel- 

 low-worker in the field of science. 



— Captain van Gele has at last succeeded in solving the prob- 

 lem of the Welle. A telegram sent by Mr. Janssen, governor of 

 the Kongo Free State, on March 15, and published in the Moiive- 

 ment geographique, announces that the Obangi above the rapids 

 of Zongo flows from east to west between 4° and 5° north latitude. 

 Captain van Gele ascended the river as far as 22° east of Green- 

 wich, and ascertained its identity with the Welle-Makua of Schwein- 

 furth and Junker. Captain van G^le, after thus having solved 

 the much-discussed problem of the Welle, returned, and reached 

 Leopoldville in safety. It will be remembered that Captain van 

 Gele, after Junker's discoveries had become known, was put in 

 charge of the exploration of the Welle. On his first expedition, 

 which was made at the high-water season, he was unable to pass 

 the rapids of Zongo. Later on, he made an attempt to reach 

 Junker's Ali-Kobbo from the Itimbiri ; but, on account of scarcity 

 ■of supplies and the density of the woods, he was unable to carry out 

 his plan. On Oct. 2, 1887, he started on his last expedition on the 

 ■' En Avant.' After a brief stay at Kwa-mouth, he began his ascent 

 of the Obangi, accompanied by Lieutenants Lienart and Dhanis 

 and a small detachment of soldiers. Junker's farthest point west 

 on the Welle was 22° 55' east from Greenwich. It would seem, 

 therefore, that Captain van G^le approached this point to within a 



■ distance of about sixty miles. The Moiive}ne}tt giographiqiie an- 

 nounces, besides the death of Captain vande Velde, chief of the 

 military expedition to Stanley Falls, — not the explorer of the 



■Obangi, as was erroneously stated in Science of March 30, — that 



■ of Lieutenant Warlomont, second in command at Boma. This is a 

 ■serious loss for the Kongo Free State, which had of late been very 

 ■iortunate, so far as the health of its employees was concerned. 



— In a review of Chamberlain's ' Catalogue of Canadian Birds,' 

 it was said that the addition of a systematic table would have great- 

 ly enhanced the value of the work. This table has been published 

 by the author under the title ' A Systematic Table of Canadian 

 Birds' (St. John, N.B., published for the author). The table, which 

 contains 551 species belonging to 236 genera, 55 families, and 15 

 orders, is very clear, presenting at once a table of the higher groups, 

 and a check-list of the birds that are found within the boundaries 

 of the Dominion. Students of American ornithology will be glad to 

 read the author's announcement in the preface, that his promised 

 ' Bibliography of Canadian Ornithology ' is well under way, and 

 will probably be published during the coming summer. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



Volapuk : Is it Difficult ? 



Here is a subject pronounced difficult to learn ; yet the learners 

 are unaware of the difficulty. Is not this an anomaly? It is like 

 the considerate Irish father who proposed to surprise his son with 

 a birthday gift by having him taught the violin 'unbeknownst.' 

 Professor March and Mr. Melville Bell, to whom the learning of 

 strange tongues is a mere pastime, pronounce Volapuk too highly 

 inflected, not for themselves, but for the English-speaking masses. 

 But the American business-man, snatching an hour or two in the 

 -evenings, somehow or other manages to surmount the obstacle 

 which the professors declare insurmountable, and after a week 

 writes grammatical Volapuk. Possibly, had he known that such 

 high authority had declared the feat impossible, he would, with his 



well-known modesty, have refrained from a practical contradiction 

 of their dicta. 



But do not these philologists (both of whom I greatly admire 

 and respect) unconsciously exaggerate the difficulty of inflected 

 language.' Is it not simply that the inflected languages which they 

 learned as boys, and which they have seen other boys toiling over 

 ever since, had got into a state of anomaly and chaotic irregularity ? 

 It seems to me, from what I have learned by reading the works of 

 these and other eminent philologists, that the crushing-off of termi- 

 nations which finally happens, is a protest against their lawlessness. 

 I say this with deference and in quotation-marks. Is it not a fact 

 that terminations, when regular, are retained, not destroyed ? There 

 is no indication that we or the Spaniards are likely to drop the con- 

 venient and nearly regular plural-sign s, and denote plurality by a 

 separate word or not at all. We have, it is true, lost a great many 

 terminations -en, and the Germans are doing the same in speech ; 

 but that is of a converse kind of irregularity. Instead of many 

 forms for one thing, -en had too many functions : it died of overwork. 



Mr. Bell thinks we " may safely assume that the universal lan- 

 guage to be some time adopted will express all verbal relations by 

 separate words, and not by root-inflections." Then Chinese is the 

 type of the coming language. Are its methods easy even in the 

 colloquial tongue? Missionaries say not : I do not know. 



Mr. Bell's transformation would result in this, for example, re- 

 taining the Volapuk syllables : to express ' of the man,' ' of the 

 time,' ' of the form,' ' of the staff,' ' of the stone,' where we now say 

 mana, iima,foma, siafa, stona, the new reading would be a man, 

 a iim, a font, a staf, a ston. Tuna, in one word, comes under the 

 head of ' Case-Endings and Other Grammatical Subtleties : ' a iim, 

 in two words, is simple, and devoid of subtlety. What a wonder- 

 ful change is wrought by the printer's space ! 



I could sincerely wish, with Mr. Bell, that there were an alphabet 

 in use, not only for Volapuk, but for all languages, which should be 

 "easily and uniformly intelligible to all readers." Mr. Bell's marvel- 

 lously perfect alphabet, ' Visible Speech,' would answer the descrip- 

 tion ; but it would have been folly to use it for Volapuk until 

 adopted for national languages. The Roman alphabet is the inter- 

 national alphabet at present, and Schleyer acted wisely in keeping 

 it. In so far as he deviated from it by his use of the un-Roman 

 a, o, ii, and his un-Roman sounds of some consonants, in so far he 

 is at fault. His principle was right. It is the associations of our 

 barbarous English spelling which make us mispronounce new 

 words like Volapuk. If the English had not double duty to per- 

 form, we should unerringly begin the word like 'wscal,' not like 

 'volume..' Some of us spelling-reformers hope some day to restrict 

 o to its proper function. 



Bishop Wilkins's ' Real Character ' (by which he does not mean 

 'phonetic representation '), and scores of other attempts at philo- 

 sophical language based on classification of ideas, have failed (in 

 spite of the genius of at least the first named) to come into practi- 

 cal use. Volapuk has been learned by more persons, I believe, and 

 more used in printing and writing, than all the others put together. 

 There must be a reason for this, which I call upon the theoretical 

 objectors to explain. An imperfect mechanism which actually 

 works is better than a most scientific motor which ' motes ' not. 



In counting up the words which are like their English prototypes, 

 Mr. Bell has omitted such as these: ii'm (time), fom (form), spid 

 (speed), sid (seed), skil (skill [the Philological Society of London 

 spells it ' skil ']), slei (slate), slip (sleep), .fwc/J (smoke), snek (snake), 

 silab (syllable). I have picked up most of these within a page. 



Well, I suppose the unlearned man wU go on acquiring this diffi- 

 cult language easily : the masses tvill do things wrong. Half a 

 dozen will write me letters this coming week (just half a dozen did 

 last week) to show me wl\at they have accomplished in a few days. 



On the other hand, I have some choice specimens of educated 

 foreigners' English which are conclusive evidence, I think, that our 

 " simple," "grammarless," " uninflected," " analytic " language con- 

 tains some fearful pitfalls for the unwary. 



I read a good deal about English being or becoming the " uni- 

 versal language," but what I read to that purport is never written 

 by Frenchmen or Germans or Italians, somehow or other. This is 

 strange, isn't it ? Charles E. Sprague. 



New York, March 31. 



