Note 117 — ON INSTRUCTION IN THE CLASSICS AND THE SCIENCES.[113]

As a rule, the human brain is too much, and wrongly, burdened with things which might be more conveniently and accurately preserved in books where they could be found at a moment's notice. In a recent letter to me from Düsseldorf, Judge Hartwich writes:

"A host of words exist which are out and out Latin or Greek, yet are employed with perfect correctness by people of good education who never had the good luck to be taught the ancient languages. For example, words like 'dynasty.' ... The child learns such words as parts of the common stock of speech, or even as parts of his mother-tongue, just as he does the words 'father,' 'mother,' 'bread,' 'milk.' Does the ordinary mortal know the etymology of these Saxon words? Did it not require the almost incredible industry of the Grimms and other Teutonic philologists to throw the merest glimmerings of light upon the origin and growth of our own mother-tongue? Besides, do not thousands of people of so-called classical education use every moment hosts of words of foreign origin whose derivation they do not know? Very few of them think it worth while to look up such words in the dictionaries, although they love to maintain that people should study the ancient languages for the sake of etymology alone."