isaster or disturbance to
pass over the whole civilized globe, was being supplemented by a sense
of spiritual solidarity. Men began to realize that the tasks of
civilization cannot be carried out except by mutual understanding and
mutual sympathy among the more civilized nations, that every nation has
something to learn from other nations, and that the bonds of
international intercourse must thus be drawn closer. This feeling of the
need of an international language led in America to several serious
attempts to obtain a consensus of opinion among scientific men regarding
an international language. Thus in 1888 the Philosophical Society of
Philadelphia, the oldest of American learned societies, unanimously
resolved, on the initiative of Brinton, to address a letter to learned
societies throughout the world, asking for their co-operation in
perfecting a language for commercial and learned purposes, based on the
Aryan vocabulary and grammar in their simplest forms, and to that end
proposing an international congress, the first meeting of which should
be held in Paris or London. In the same year Horatio Hale read a paper
on the same subject before the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. A little later, in 1890, it was again proposed at a meeting
of the same Association that, in order to consider the question of the
construction and adoption of a symmetrical and scientific language, a
congress should be held, delegates being in proportion to the number of
persons speaking each language.

These excellent proposals seem, however, to have borne little fruit. It
is always an exceedingly difficult matter to produce combined action
among scientific societies even of the same nation. Thus the way has
been left open for individuals to adopt the easier but far less decisive
or satisfactory method of inventing a new language by their own unaided
exertions. Certainly over a hundred such languages have been proposed
during the past century. The most famous of these was undoubtedly
Volapuek, which was invented in 1880 by Schleyer, a German-Swiss priest
who knew many languages and had long pondered over this problem, but who
was not a scientific philologist; the actual inception of the language
occurred in a dream. Volapuek was almost the first real attempt at an
organic language capable of being used for the oral transmission of
thought. On this account, no doubt, it met with great and widespread
success; it was actively