THE Board of Superintendents of the City of New York recently ruled' that is a code and not a language. This statement came as a reply to a petition signed by several hundred students at the New Lots Evening High School and supported by several organizations in New York City, requesting the introduction of as a foreign language into our school system. A by-law of the Board of Education makes the teaching of any foreign language mandatory upon the petition of seventy signatures by students of any one high school. Esperanto, however, being a code and not a language, according to the Board of Superintendents, is not subject to this ruling. Several reasons were given why cannot be introduced into the city school system, one of which reads as follows: Esperanto is an artificial, arbitrary (though logical) code, not a language. Human beings do not express themselves, except for definite and restricted purposes, in a code, and no code, however logical and 'scientific,' can be an adequate conveyer of thought, rich in shades of meaning, as are the 'natural languages.' 1 No authoritative reference was given for this arbitrary and inadequate definition of a code and the classification of as such. The present discussion purports to show that the most authoritative sources and references in the fields of research, education, linguistics, and social sciences consider a language and not a code. Research procedure.-Since the problem of has occupied during forty-nine years the attention of the foremost thinkers of our time, such as Tolstoy, Ostwald, Couturat, Schuchardt, Marr, Jespersen, Sapir, Meillet, to mention only a few, and since it has been used extensively in international life, it is no surprise that all our reference books, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as linguistic literature all over the world, mention in one form or another. It will be therefore almost a physical impossibility to quote all the references to Esperanto. The present writer, author of a Ph.D. thesis2 and many articles which deal with the problem of an international language, particularly with Esperanto,3 has never come across a statement that is a code in