Italian will be spoken by 53,370,000 French will be spoken by 72,571,000 German will be spoken by 157,480,000 Spanish will be spoken in Europe, by 36,938,338 South America, by 468,347,904 Total: 505,286,242 English will be spoken in Europe, by 178,846,153 United States, and British Dependencies, by 1,658,440,000 Total: 1,837,286,153 But I shall say no more on this, for as it is, I know I shall never hear the end of it, and shall go down to posterity, if for nothing else, at least for this the most suicidal folly in a student of languages; a folly comparable only to that of Leibniz, who actually conceived the possibility of one universal language. To return, however, to the problem to the solution of which Mr. Pitman has devoted the whole of his active life, let me say again that my interest in it is purely philological; or, if you like, historical. The problem which has to be solved in England and the United States of America is not a new one, nor an isolated one. It occurs again and again in the history of language; in fact, it must occur. When languages are reduced to writing, they are at first written phonetically, though always in a very rough-and-ready manner. One dialect, that of the dominant, the literary, or priestly character, is generally selected; and the spelling, once adopted, becomes in a very short time traditional and authoritative. What took place thousands of years ago, we can see taking place, if we like, at the present moment. A missionary from the island of Mangaia, the Rev. W. Gill, first introduced the art of writing among his converts. He learned their language, at least one dialect of it, he translated part of the Bible into it, and adopted, of necessity, a phonetic spelling. That dialect is gradually becoming the recognized literary language of the whole island, and his spelling is taught at school. Other dialects, however, continue to be spoken, and they may in time influence the literary dialect. For the present, however, the missionary dialect, as it is called by the natives themselves, and the missionary spelling, rule supreme, and it will be some time before a spelling reform is wanted out there.