the scientific societies of the world to use English for bibliographical purposes is not entirely a tribute to English energy in organization, but to the quality of the language. One finds, indeed, that these facts are widely recognized abroad, in France and elsewhere, though I have noted that those who foretell the conquest of English, even when they are men of intellectual distinction and able to read English, are often quite unable to speak it or to understand it when spoken.
That brings us to a point which is overlooked by those who triumphantly pointed to the natural settlement of this question by the swamping of other tongues in the overflowing tide of English speech. English is the most concise and laconic of the great languages. Greek, French and German are all more expansive, more syllabically copious. Latin alone may be said to equal, or surpass English in concentration, because, although Latin words are longer on the average, by their greater inflection they cover a larger number of English words. This power of English to attain expression with a minimum expenditure of energy in written speech is one of its chief claims to succeed Latin as the auxiliary international language. But it furnishes no claim to preference for actual speaking, in which this economy of energy ceases to be a supreme virtue, since here we have also to admit the virtues of easy intelligibility and of persuasiveness. Greek largely owed its admirable fitness for speech to the natural richness and prolongation of its euphonious words, which allowed the speaker to attain the legitimate utterance of his thought without pauses or superfluous repetition. French, again, while by no means inapt for concentration, as the pensée writers show, most easily lends itself to effects that are meant for speech, as in Bossuet, or that recall speech, as in Mme de Sevigné in one order of literature, or Renan in another. But at