ation, life and motion, the convex and
the concave of a curve, then will it be possible for thought to tread
speech under foot and to hope to do without it--then will it be
conceivable that the vigorous and fertile intellect should renounce its
own double, its instrument of expression and the channel of its
speculations and emotions.

'As if,' he exclaims finely, 'language were the hired servant, the mere
mistress of reason, and not the lawful wife in her own house!'

If you need further argument (but what serves it to slay the slain?) let
me remind you that you cannot use the briefest, the humblest process of
thought, cannot so much as resolve to take your bath hot or cold, or
decide what to order for breakfast, without forecasting it to yourself in
some form of words. Words are, in fine, the only currency in which we can
exchange thought even with ourselves. Does it not follow, then, that the
more accurately we use words the closer definition we shall give to our
thoughts? Does it not follow that by drilling ourselves to write
perspicuously we train our minds to clarify their thought? Does it not
follow that some practice in the deft use of words, with its
correspondent defining of thought, may well be ancillary even to the
study of Natural Science in a University?

But I have another word for our men of science. It was inevitable,
perhaps, that Latin--so long the Universal Language--should cease in time
to be that in which scientific works were written. It was impossible,
perhaps, to substitute, by consent, some equally neat and austere modern
language, such as French. But when it became an accepted custom for each
nation to use its own language in scientific treatises, it certainly was
not foreseen that men of science would soon be making discoveries at a
rate which left their skill in words outstripped; that having to invent
their terms as they went along, yet being careless and contemptuous of a
science in which they have no training, they would bombast out our
dictionaries with monstrously invented words that not only would have
made Quintilian stare and gasp, but would affront the decently literate
of any age.

After all, and though we must sigh and acquiesce in the building of
Babel, we have some right to examine the bricks. I was waiting, the other
day, in a doctor's anteroom, and picked up one of those books--it was a
work on pathology--so thoughtfully left lying in such places; to persuade
us,