150 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [July, 



objects. For the people at large to pronounce them correctly would be a 

 tremendous task, and to understand them accurately an impossibility. 

 And it will readily be admitted that whatever increases the 

 difficulty of acquiring the terminology of a science, tends likewise 

 to disgust the student and render it unpopular. This has of late 

 been greatly felt in England, and attempts are being made to divest 

 popular hooks as much as possible of hard and not easily intelligible 

 technical terms. To Englishmen Greek and Latin words twisted 

 and turned and shaped on the lathe of the English Grammar, 

 do not appear so foreign and difficult as they must be to the natives 

 of this country, and yet to the former we scruple to offer that which 

 we propose to drive down the throats of the latter. I am not 

 insensible to the advantages of uniformity. 1 readily admit the 

 great benefit which science would derive by having a common termi- 

 nology the world over. But a universal terminology is not a 

 universal language, capable of bringing together the different nations 

 of the earth to one brotherhood. The one is, however, as Utopian 

 and impracticable as the other. The nations of. Europe, all drawing 

 their terminology from Greek and Latin roots, have failed to secure 

 uniformity. The genius of the different languages have so masked 

 and transmuted the same words, that to people uninitiated in 

 the mysteries of those languages, they appear totally different. To 

 an Englishman unacquainted with French, the chemical terms of 

 France are as unintelligible as those of Germany. But there is 

 another agency at work more potent than the genius of a language, 

 to promote and maintain the divergence of human tongues. It is 

 the climate. However startling it may appear at first sight, it is 

 as true as the sun will rise to-morrow, that the six consonants apiece 

 of the Russian and the sibilants of the English which we have to 

 u hiss, spit and sputter all," owe their origin mainly, if not solely, 

 to climatic influence. That influence in India has given a soft 

 flabby character to the vocal chords, which Avill always stand in the 

 way of a correct pronunciation of English words in this country. 

 No more will English blood maintain its English character for three 

 generations successively in this land, than English words maintain 

 their speciality. The climate will tell as unmistakeably and as 

 purely on the one as on the other. In less than a century, English 



