The Bishop of Oxford, in distributing the certificates and prizes
awarded to the candidates in the Oxford Local Examina- tions of 1885 at the London and Southwark centres, on Wednes- day, in the theatre of the University of London, delivered an extremely interesting defence of language as the most useful of all disciplinary studies. The Bishop held that the number of those young people so constituted as to be educated successfully, either wholly or mainly, by the discipline of science is but small; and he held the discipline of language to be not only the most effective for those whom it suits, but, on mere utilitarian grounds, far the most useful. You can use a match-box or a pump to the best possible effect without really under- standing its operation at all. If you wanted to repair your pump, you would send to the plumber, even though you yourself understood fully what it needed. But you could not use the most useful of all tools, language, to the best purpose without really understanding its structure ; you could not get any one to mend effectually your broken sentences for you if you did not know how to mend them for yourself. Further, it would be im- possible to master the felicities of any great language without attaining an insight into the secrets of the heart of even higher value than the mastery of the greatest of all tools itself. That seems to us a singularly just and weighty argument for linguistic studies.
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