intelligence of the lower animals.  It is called Logos; what does Logos mean? it stands both for reason and for speech, and it is difficult to say which it means more properly.  It means both at once:  why? because really they cannot be divided....  When we can separate light and illumination, 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, no doubt, to bear the ills we have rather than fly to others capable of being illustrated.  I found myself engaged in following the manoeuvres of certain well-meaning bacilli generically described as ‘Antibodies.’  I do not accuse the author (who seemed to be a learned man) of having invented this abominable term:  apparently it passed current among physiologists and he had accepted it for honest coin.  I found it, later on, in Webster’s invaluable dictionary:  Etymology, ‘anti’ up against ‘body’, some noxious ‘foreign body’ inside your body or mine.