566 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
pupils were taught to speak and to write the language, to use it in the 
affairs of every-day life. It was not only the Latin of books, but of the 
playground, of the street, of public discussion. While it was not the 
speech of the common people, it was the general medium of correspond- 
ence, of law and of diplomacy, until superseded by French. One needs 
but to read the letters of Erasmus or the Letters of Obscure Men to see 
what a facile medium of expression it was. How easily a foreign lan- 
guage may be acquired is daily demonstrated in the public schools of 
our large cities. The children of the immigrants who come into this 
country by tens of thousands from all parts of the world usually learn 
English, to them a foreign tongue, in a year or less. Were it not so 
common the phenomenon would be called marvelous. Children do not 
employ the principle of association; they simply yield to the natural 
instinct to imitate. Unconsciously they strive to reproduce speech- 
sounds until they get them to conform to those they hear uttered in 
their presence. When they begin to talk, usually in the second year, 
their enunciation and pronunciation are very defective. But by con- 
stant though unconscious effort they approximate more and more nearly 
to the correct sounds until they attain complete conformity. When 
they are engaged in learning two or three languages at the same time 
they rarely confound them. ‘They usually answer in the language in 
which they are addressed. Children under favorable conditions before 
they are old enough to attend school learn a list of some thousand of 
words without knowing how. Their vocabulary grows faster than their 
minds. It is easier for them to learn the words that designate common 
things in two or three languages than to comprehend an unfamiliar 
idea. After the age of mental maturity the task becomes more and 
more difficult and is rarely accomplished correctly. There are, however, 
here and there persons who can, by an effort, reproduce any speech- 
sound they hear, as long as their auditory apparatus is unimpaired. 
Contrary to the popular belief, the ability to speak several languages 
is not a mark of mental power. It merely indicates a retentive memory 
of a certain kind and a knack for imitating sounds~ Sir Richard Bur- 
ton relates in one of his books that once when near Jeddah he was 
accosted by a man in Turkish. Getting no response, he tried Persian ; 
then the same silence made him try Arabic. When his listener still 
kept silent he grumbled out his astonishment in Hindustani. That 
also failing, he tried in succession Pushtu, Armenian, English, French 
and Italian. When Burton could no longer restrain his risibilities, he 
admitted his nationality and chatted for some time with the stranger 
in English, which he spoke very well. Professor Starr says in his 
“The Truth about the Congo” that members of the Bantu tribes are 
often met with who speak several languages readily. A recent denom- 
inational periodical gives the names of several men who preach in four 
different languages and a larger number in three. One clergyman is 
