gather from his preface, by the proved
usefulness of mathematical signs, Wilkins attempted to provide for
philosophers of all countries a better means of communication than
Latin, then the universal language of literature and science, but in his
opinion unscientific, full of anomalies and difficult to acquire; for in
it there were, he said, thirty thousand words. In his language there
were only three thousand, and they could be learnt by a man of good
capacity in a month. His estimate of capacity and diligence is somewhat
high. It is possible to explain the principles on which he constructed
his new tongue. He began by dividing the universe, the sum total of
existence, things, thoughts, relations, after the manner of Aristotle,
though not into ten, but into forty categories, or genera, or great
classes, such as World, Element, Animal, and apparently species of
animals, such as Bird, Fish, Beast: for each of these great classes he
devised a monosyllabic name--_e.g._, De for Element, Za for Fish; each
of these genera is subdivided into species indicated by the addition of
a consonant, and these are again subdivided into subordinate species
distinguished by a vowel affixed. For example--De means an Element, any
of the four, Fire, Air, Earth, Water; add to it B, which, as the first
consonant, stands for the first species of a genus, and you will have
the significant word DEB, which means Fire, for it, we know not why, is
the first of the four Elements. Let us take a more complex instance--his
name for Salmon. The salmon is a species of Za or Fish, a particular
kind of fish called N, namely, the Squameous river fish. This class ZaN
is subdivided into lower classes, and the lower class Salmon is called
A, which means the red-fleshed kind of squameous river fish, and so a
salmon is a ZaNA. If you wished to state the fact that a salmon swims,
you would use the words ZaNA GoF, for Go stands for the great category
of motion, F for the particular kind of motion meant, swimming. Voice,
tense, and mood are indicated by lines of different lengths, straight or
curved, crossed, hooked, looped; adverbs and conjunctions by dots or
points differently arranged.

Wilkins' universal character therefore means a kind of shorthand writing
of his Real Language.

The writer fears that he may only have confused his readers and himself
by his bold but poor attempt to express in a few lines the meaning of
six hundred pages. He would be the last to