I'm always amazed by the the apparent amount of foreign languages that scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries seem to have possessed. With the end of Latin as the main scholarly language, researchers started to write in their mother tongue. I'm aware that sometimes papers got translated when they were reprinted in a foreign journal, which was pretty common back then (the reprinting, not the translation as far as I know…), but it seems obvious for example in the field of botany in Germany, that people had to have a command (at least to the level of a reading comprehension) of at least Latin, French, and English in order to participate in scholarly discourse.
I was wondering where and how scientists acquired those skills, or if this is a case where there is a nowadays unknown army of translators that facilitated the discourse and bridged the gap in that way.