Few young people possess, during their years at the university, sufficient keenness and moral courage to subject themselves to the ordeal of linguistic studies, from which they have joyfully escaped on their entrance into the university. Few possess at that age a full conception of the usefulness and necessity of a knowledge of languages. And it is just those young people who wish to devote themselves to the professions of literature or science who ought to devote their whole time and full powers to their professional work, and not be obliged to break up their time with linguistic studies. The proposal to exclude the classical languages from the secondary schools has encountered, however, from many quarters very weighty objections, the force of which cannot be denied, even by the opposite side. We shall, however, not enter into this much-debated question, contenting ourselves with the remark that at the present day insuperable obstacles stand in the way of a complete or partial substitution of modern for classical languages. Experience shows also that the teaching of modern languages in schools seldom leads to a practical result, although it must be conceded that nowadays, with newer methods, much better results are obtained than formerly, when the grammar, but not the practical use, was taught. If, therefore, the teaching of modern languages cannot well be carried out either at the universities or in the schools, there remains only the time before school studies. It is, in fact, possible (as is done in many well-to-do families), by means of a French or German governess, to teach a child, besides its mother tongue, one of these languages, in so far as its mental development permits. It is probably inadvisable to teach more than one new language in this way, in order to avoid injury to the child's own mother tongue. Such a knowledge, however, is quite insufficient for the needs of the young scientific man, and so the acquaintance with a language gained in this way requires constant extension and development. But even assuming that the young man continues the study of the language that he has learnt as a child, or even indeed learns another during his school days, he will possess at best that approximate knowledge of the three chief languages which we have characterised above as being neither qualitatively nor quantitatively sufficient, because it does not suffice for oral intercourse, and because other languages must be taken into account. The proposal has, therefore, been made to choose, by international agreement, _one_ of the national languages as a universal _intermediary_ language. If everybody learnt this language, then the difficulty would be surmounted.