ned to perpetuate
the events of history, the discoveries in other arts, and the opinions
of those ancient philosophers on other subjects. Thus their figures of
Venus for beauty, Minerva for wisdom, Mars and Bellona for war,
Hercules for strength, and many others, became afterwards the deities
of Greece and Rome; and together with the figures of Time, Death, and
Fame, constitute the language of the painters to this day.

From the similarity of the characters which designate the metals in
chemistry, and the planets in astronomy, it may be concluded that
these parts of science were then believed to be connected; whence
astrology seems to have been a very early superstition. These, so far,
constitute an universal visible language in those sciences.

So the glory, or halo, round the head is a part of the universal
language of the eye, designating a holy person; wings on the shoulders
denote a good angel; and a tail and hoof denote the figure of an evil
demon; to which may be added the cap of liberty and the tiara of
popedom. It is to be wished that many other universal characters could
be introduced into practice, which might either constitute a more
comprehensive language for painters, or for other arts; as those of
ciphers and signs have done for arithmetic and algebra, and crotchets
for music, and the alphabets for articulate sounds; so a zigzag line
made on white paper by a black-lead pencil, which communicates with
the surface of the mercury in the barometer, as the paper itself is
made constantly to move laterally by a clock, and daily to descend
through the space necessary, has ingeniously produced a most accurate
visible account of the rise and fall of the mercury in the barometer
every hour in the year.

Mr. Grey's Memoria Technica was designed as an artificial language to
remember numbers, as of the eras, or dates of history. This was done
by substituting one consonant and one vowel for each figure of the ten
cyphers used in arithmetic, and by composing words of these letters;
which words Mr. Grey makes into hexameter verses, and produces an
audible jargon, which is to be committed to memory, and occasionally
analysed into numbers when required. An ingenious French botanist,
Monsieur Bergeret, has proposed to apply this idea of Mr. Grey to a
botanical nomenclature, by making the name of each plant to consist of
letters, which, when analysed, were to signify the number of the
class, order, genus, and species, wit