What then is the real use of a Congress, such as that which has brought us together this week from all parts of the world? What is the real excuse for our existence? Why are we here, and not in our workshops? It seems to me that the real and permanent use of these scientific gatherings is twofold. (1) They enable us to take stock, to compare notes, to see where we are, and to find out where we ought to be going. (2) They give us an opportunity, from time to time, to tell the world where we are, what we have been doing for the world, and what, in return, we expect the world to do for us. The danger of all scientific work at present, not only among Oriental scholars, but, as far as I can see, everywhere, is the tendency to extreme specialization. Our age shows in that respect a decided reaction against the spirit of a former age, which those with gray heads among us can still remember, an age represented in Germany by such names as Humboldt, Ritter, Böckh, Johannes, Müller, Bopp, Bunsen, and others; men who look to us like giants, carrying a weight of knowledge far too heavy for the shoulders of such mortals as now be; aye, men who _were_ giants, but whose chief strength consisted in this, that they were never entirely absorbed or bewildered by special researches, but kept their eye steadily on the highest objects of all human knowledge; who could trace the vast outlines of the kosmos of nature or the kosmos of the mind with an unwavering hand, and to whose maps and guide books we must still recur, whenever we are in danger of losing our way in the mazes of minute research. At the present moment such works as Humboldt’s “Kosmos,” or Bopp’s “Comparative Grammar,” or Bunsen’s “Christianity and Mankind,” would be impossible. No one would dare to write them, for fear of not knowing the exact depth at which the _Protogenes Haeckelii_ has lately been discovered or the lengthening of a vowel in the +Saṃhitapâṭha+ of the Rig-Veda. It is quite right that this should be so, at least, for a time; but all rivers, all brooks, all rills, are meant to flow into the ocean, and all special knowledge, to keep it from stagnation, must have an outlet into the general knowledge of the world. Knowledge for its own sake, as it is sometimes called, is the most dangerous idol that a student can worship. We despise the miser who amasses money for the sake of money, but still more contemptible is the intellectual miser who hoards up knowledge instead of spending it, though, with regard to most of our knowledge, we may be well assured and satisfied that, as we brought nothing into the world so we may carry nothing out.