NOTES. 379 
success. Educational institutions and associations should bear 
their testimony to its. importance, and every one interested in the 
cause of education, every lover of nature should make this a matter 
of public notoriety and publiċ interest, and obtain for it the hearty 
cooperation of members of the cdming Legislature. We shall re- 
vert again to this topic and keep our readers acquainted with any 
new development. 
Necessity of a Common Language in Natural Science. «It 
may be asked why I, in my catalogue of arachnological literature, 
have not included any other works than those written in Latin or in 
the living languages of Teutonic or Roman origin. The reason is, 
not that I undervalue what may have been written in other lan- 
guages (which I am very far from doing), but simply that I am 
unable to understand even the titles of works written in, for ex- 
ample, Russian, Polish, Bohemian, Finnish, or Magyar ; and thus 
I have only by accident come to learn that a couple of works in 
these languages treat on arachnological subjects. 
“It may in general be taken for granted that a person of liberal 
education has some acquaintance with Latin, and knows at least 
one Teutonic and one Romanic language; and when this is the 
case, he can, without any great waste of time, learn so much of 
the others as to be able, with the help of a grammar and a diction- 
ary, to understand the purely descriptive works within his own 
department that are written in those languages. This is probably 
the reason why, in determining questions of priority, it is custom- 
ary to attribute as much importance to works written in, for in- 
stance, Portuguese or Swedish as to those written in any of the 
more generally studied languages. But it is, of course, impossible 
to assign the same weight to all languages. No naturalist can 
have time to acquire the knowledge of all the European languages 
which have already a scientific literature to show; and the lan- 
guages of this part of the world will assuredly not long continue 
to keep exclusive possession of that territory. It would seem, 
therefore, to be absolutely necessary, even for the future, in the 
selection of the works of which a zoologist or botanist ought to 
be expected to possess a knowledge, and which, in the determina- 
tion of questions of priority, ought to be taken into account, to 
confine one’s self to those which are written in the living lan- 
guages of Teutonic or Roman origin and in Latin. 
