27 
it is attempted to employ them to meet the various require- 
ments of our complicated scientific and other nomenclature. 
Difference of language, although the greatest, is not the 
only bar to communication. Another lesser but still very 
appreciable difficulty is the variety of characters and alpha- 
bets in use in various parts of the world. Thus in Europe 
alone we have, beside the ordinary Italian characters, the 
German, Greek, and Cyrillic or Russian ; and if we go fur- 
ther east, among those languages where the so-called tones 
prevail, or where gutturals of different kinds are in use, 
and where our limited alphabet becomes almost useless, we 
have a large number of peculiar alphabets, each one an 
irritating barrier to free intercourse with the language. 
In the presence of these various difficulties it has been 
thought by some that a scheme might be devised by which 
communication might be carried on independently of lan- 
guage ; that by a system of ideographs instead of words we 
might invent a conventional formulary, by means of which 
the common ideas of men might have a common represent- 
ation ; that we might do, in fact, what was done in the 
earliest period of writing, what the Chinese, the Mexicans, 
the Egyptians, and the Akkadians of Mesopotamia did, 
namely, use characters which should represent ideas and not 
words or sounds. It is well known that this is still the 
case in China ; that many people can read Chinese books 
who know nothing or very little of the Chinese language. 
The Japanese, for instance, whose language is entirely 
different, are taught in their schools to read Chinese books 
without being taught the Chinese language. Such a system, 
if universally accepted, would be well described by the term 
pasigraphy. It is such a system which has been developed 
With great sacrifice and patience by a German savant called 
M. Bachmaier, and which I wish to bring before you to-night. 
Without expressing any opinion as to its utility, there can 
be no doubt as to its being quite practicable and easy to 
