it
exceedingly probable that the persons who had studied Greek sufficiently
to translate those works, such for instance as Euclid's Elements, did
not understand any of the learning the works contained.

As there is now nothing new to be learned from the dead languages, all
the useful books being already translated, the languages are become
useless, and the time expended in teaching and in learning them is
wasted. So far as the study of languages may contribute to the progress
and communication of knowledge (for it has nothing to do with the
creation of knowledge) it is only in the living languages that new
knowledge is to be found; and certain it is, that, in general, a
youth will learn more of a living language in one year, than of a dead
language in seven; and it is but seldom that the teacher knows much of
it himself. The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise
from any superior abstruseness in the languages themselves, but in their
being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same
thing with any other language when it becomes dead. The best Greek
linguist that now exists does not understand Greek so well as a Grecian
plowman did, or a Grecian milkmaid; and the same for the Latin,
compared with a plowman or a milkmaid of the Romans; and with respect
to pronunciation and idiom, not so well as the cows that she milked. It
would therefore be advantageous to the state of learning to abolish
the study of the dead languages, and to make learning consist, as it
originally did, in scientific knowledge.

The apology that is sometimes made for continuing to teach the dead
languages is, that they are taught at a time when a child is not capable
of exerting any other mental faculty than that of memory. But this
is altogether erroneous. The human mind has a natural disposition to
scientific knowledge, and to the things connected with it. The first and
favourite amusement of a child, even before it begins to play, is that
of imitating the works of man. It builds bouses with cards or sticks; it
navigates the little ocean of a bowl of water with a paper boat; or dams
the stream of a gutter, and contrives something which it calls a mill;
and it interests itself in the fate of its works with a care that
resembles affection. It afterwards goes to school, where its genius is
killed by the barren study of a dead language, and the philosopher is
lost in the linguist.

But the apology that is now mad