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Show John Fiske, Linguist. How many college undergraduates of today can rival the linguistic attainments at-tainments of John Flske when he was a student at Harvard? John Spencer Clark, in his life of Flske, quotes the following passage from a letter that Fiske wrote to Miss Abble Morgan 1 Brooks, whom he afterwards married: mar-ried: "I can't talk in any language but my own ; but I read In German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, Greek and Anglo-Saxon. Then, with hard study, I can decipher sentence sen-tence by sentence Dutch, Danish. Swedish, Hebrew, Chaldee and Sanskrit; San-skrit; and there are some few I have dipped Into without doing much, either because they have little literature or because I have no time for them Zend, Gothic, Wallachlan and Provencal. Proven-cal. Persian and Arabic I long to know, but I despair of ever having the time to learn them; there Is so much to be done in other things. Before long anatomy, physiology and kindred sciences will engross me, and I am afraid I shall have to bid a last farewell fare-well to philology." Youth's Companion. |