298 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
With this observation, we may leave the discussion of Weitling's
curious interest in a universal language. It is easy to dismiss his
artificially constructed samples of a new universal tongue as utter
nonsense, for they were far more confused and difficult to under
stand than the national languages which he wanted to dethrone.
The result of his efforts was a philological hodgepodge. Yet this
little treatise revealed that the author had done an incredible
amount of desultory reading in science, language, history, and the
arts. Parts of his argument were well written, with much of the
reformer's earlier eloquence and fire, and the amount of scientific
terminology with which the author was familiar is astounding.
Much of it is correctly used. From many sources, he had picked
up considerable information in natural history, and especially in
botany, zoology and mineralogy, and he was thoroughly familiar
with Linnaeus' classifications of the species and natural phenom
ena. The information is unorganized and spotty, but life had given
him little opportunity to drink deeper of the wells of knowledge.
His curiosity and his passion to know equaled that of many of the
"professors and doctors" whom he thoroughly disliked and se
cretly envied.
The beginning of his interest in astronomy cannot be so clearly
dated as the origin of his study of a universal language. Perhaps it
was not strange that a nature with such a strong ingredient of
romanticism should be awed by the grandeur of the starry heavens
at night and should turn to a study of the "Queen of the Sciences."
Furthermore, for a man of Weitling's temperament, it was as easy
to challenge the theories of Newton and Copernicus as it was to
challenge all the existing theories of social organization. Perhaps
the comet of 1843 to which he referred in the Gerechtigkeit first
aroused his interest in astronomy, though in his pamphlet Der
bewegende Urstoff he reported that his attention was turned to
a study of the heavens in 1854, when he reached the word astron
omy in preparing the classifications for his universal language. He
could not find an adequate bridge between chemistry, physics,