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 GREEK AS INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE. 22/ subject, as a rule it is not understood by at least two-thirds of the participants in the congress. An illustration of the difficulty thus present- ing itself on account of the polyglot condition of these medical assemblies is found in a letter written by a prominent German surgeon, dated December 28th, 1892, to the Pfesident of the American Surgical Association, concerning the Pan-American Medical Congress. The languages of the congress were the Span- ish, French, Portuguese, and English. The German was excluded, probably because it is nowhere in America recognized as official. The surgeon says in his letter : " I do not be- lieve that the physicians of Germany will be able to take an active part in the transactions of this Pan-American Congress, unless they are enabled to use the German language in deliver- ing their lectures.'* The difficulty in this case was overcome by changing the statutes, by allowing lectures to be delivered in any language, provided that the authors of lectures in other than the official lan- guages transmit to the general secretary a synop- sis, of not more than six hundred words, before a certain date in advance of the date of the con- gress. A further condition was that a manu-