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resemblance to its primary form, so that without knowing something of the language beforehand, we are able to find hardly any of the words occurring in a given phrase, and even those we do find will give no connected sense. Suppose, for example, I had written the simple sentence adduced above in German: "Ich weiss nicht wo ich den Stock gelassen habe; haben Sie ihn nicht gesehen?" Anyone who did not speak or understand German, after searching for each word separately in a dictionary, would produce the following farrago of nonsense: "I; white; not; where; I ;—; stick; dispassionate; property; to have; she, they, you;—; not;—?" I need scarcely point out that a lexicon of a modern language is usually a volume of a certain bulk, and the search for any number of words one by one is in itself a most laborious undertaking, not to speak of the different significations attaching to the same word, amongst which there is but a bare possibility of the student selecting the right one. The international vocabulary, owing to the highly synthetic structure of the language, is a mere leaflet, which one might carry in one's note book, or the waistcoat-pocket.
Granted that we had a language with a grammar simplified to the utmost, and whose every word had a definite fixed meaning, the person addressed would require not only to have beforehand some knowledge of the grammar, to be able, even with the vocabulary at hand, to understand anything addressed to bin), but would also need some previous acquaintance with the vocabulary itself, in order to be able to distinguish between the primitive word and its grammatically-altered derivatives. The utility, again, of such a language would wholly depend upon the number of its adepts, for when sitting, for instance, in a railway-carriage, and wishing to ask a fellow-traveller "How long do we stop at — ?" it is scarcely to be expected
B
