Abstract
I HAVE always shared the regret of your correspondents that Latin has now ceased to be employed as the international language of science, although for more than a thousand years after it had ceased to be a vernacular it had, among men of education, maintained its position as a living language, adapting itself to the varying needs of the times. I have devoted some attention to the development during the Middle Ages and succeeding centuries of the branches of science in which I am more especially interested, and have been struck by the clear, fluent Latin in which the majority of the scientific treatises were written. That of Agricola, Encelius (Entzelt), Gesner, Camden, and Cæsalpinus in the sixteenth century; Francisco Imperato and Aldrovandi in the seventeenth; and Isaac Lawson, Cramer, and Linnus in the eighteenth, and most of their fellow-workers is, as a rule, as easy to follow as French, in spite of the handicap of the want of articles, the most serious defect of Latin.
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EVANS, J. International Latin. Nature 97, 122 (1916). https://doi.org/10.1038/097122a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/097122a0
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