orms me that he _printed_ the book, and he has obligingly
placed at my disposal a few specimens of the peculiar types used. The
result was, a thick quarto volume, every page of which bristles with
evidences of acute erudition, and the most accurate reasoning and
discernment. It bears the title of "A Universal Alphabet, Grammar,
and Language," and it has for a motto a text from the book of
_Zephaniah_--"For then will I turn to the people a _pure language_,
that they may call upon the name of the Lord."

He seems to have aimed at the production of an "Alphabet of
Characters," which should indicate the various sounds of the voice,
and he succeeded. "I thought," he says, in the preface to his book,
"and still think it, theoretically, a near approach to perfection.
Into this character I translated the whole of St. Matthew's Gospel,
and various extracts from the _Psalms_ and other books." "With great
reluctance, and not without much pain," he came to the conclusion
that this system was impracticable, and he "therefore gave up the idea
altogether of that character, and looked about for some other." It
then occurred to him that the Roman alphabet "might be supplemented by
certain marks, so as to represent all the elementary sounds;" and this
resulted in his compiling an alphabet containing forty symbols, of
which five--_ai_, _au_, _oi_, _ou_, and _oo_ are compounds; the
remaining thirty-five are the ordinary letters, some of which have
marks under them, like the dash we make under a word in writing to
indicate greater force or emphasis, thus--U D Z o d z.

Having arrived at this point, he intimates his belief that his
next discovery was the result of direct inspiration. "I am far from
superstitious, yet I must confess, with regard to this discovery, I
have long felt as though I had been no more than a mere instrument,
accomplishing the will of Another; and that the direction of my
thoughts, and my ultimate convictions, were only a part of the
development of my own mind, enforced and controlled by some internal
law, which ensured its own effects without any original exercise of
my own reason. One thing is certain: I cannot tell how it was brought
into my own i mind, and I have no recollection of the process which
ultimately revealed to me a knowledge of the power and essential
importance of the discovery."

The discovery of which he speaks is that the "success of the
Philosophic [language] turned upon the proper use of two sh