Three years ago I was one of those who gathered in the Sanders Theatre to commemorate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of a college founded to perpetuate living learning chiefly by the help of three dead languages, the Hebrew, the Greek and the Latin. I have given them that order of precedence which they had in the minds of those our pious founders. The Hebrew came first because they believed that it had been spoken by God himself and that it would have been the common speech of mankind but for the judicial invention of the modern languages at Shinar. Greek came next because the New Testament was written in that tongue, and Latin last as the interpreter between scholars. Of the men who stood about that fateful cradle swung from bough of the primeval forest, there were probably few who believed that a book written in any living language could itself live.

I congratulate the Modern Language Association on the establishment of a section which is as indispensable to language as the character of the Prince of Denmark is to the play of Hamlet. Language lives in sound; and the study of modern languages is the study of the spoken tongues.