ame]

Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labour; and the
professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of
broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those
rich materials, to give the world a complete body of all arts and
sciences; which, however, might be still improved, and much expedited, if
the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such
frames in Lagado, and oblige the managers to contribute in common their
several collections.

He assured me "that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his
youth; that he had emptied the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made
the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books
between the numbers of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of
speech."

I made my humblest acknowledgment to this illustrious person, for his
great communicativeness; and promised, "if ever I had the good fortune to
return to my native country, that I would do him justice, as the sole
inventor of this wonderful machine;" the form and contrivance of which I
desired leave to delineate on paper, as in the figure here annexed. I
told him, "although it were the custom of our learned in Europe to steal
inventions from each other, who had thereby at least this advantage, that
it became a controversy which was the right owner; yet I would take such
caution, that he should have the honour entire, without a rival."

We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in
consultation upon improving that of their own country.

The first project was, to shorten discourse, by cutting polysyllables
into one, and leaving out verbs and participles, because, in reality, all
things imaginable are but norms.

The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words
whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health,
as well as brevity. For it is plain, that every word we speak is, in
some degree, a diminution of our lunge by corrosion, and, consequently,
contributes to the shortening of our lives. An expedient was therefore
offered, "that since words are only names for things, it would be more
convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary
to express a particular business they are to discourse on." And this
invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as
health of the subject, if the women, i