learn; and my friend Dr. Birch, of the British Museum, 
has told me that he has used it with ease in correspondence. 
The systems of picture writing above-named are all more 
or less cumbrous and difficult of application, because they 
employ an immense number of signs. Even the Chinese, 
which is the most satisfactory of these systems, and has by 
an ingenious system of combination reduced its simple forms 
to about 800, is very cumbrous. The system which I now 
introduce to you is much simpler, in that there are only 10 
simple signs, namely the 10 first numbers, from the com- 
bination of which any vocabulary of any length can be 
represented, while it is an easy matter by a few simple 
marks to represent grammatical forms, and thus enable us 
to put down actual phrases and sentences, and not merely 
so many crude and substantive ideas which it requires an 
effort of the mind to combine into either sentences or loffical 
O 
propositions. 
The principle of the plan is this : — A dictionary is pre- 
pared of each language : this may be of any length. In the 
scheme of M. Bachmaier 4,331 words have been chosen, by 
means of which an interchange of ideas on nearly any sub- 
ject can be carried on. The words in these dictionaries 
each have a number attached to them, beginning with 1 
and ending with 4,334. These numbers correspond to ex- 
actly the same words in each language; thus, if heart ha.ve 
the number 26 attached to it in English, 26 will be attached 
to coeur in the French, and to herz in the German dictionary, 
etc. etc. Each number thus becomes, therefore, an ideo- 
graph, and represents one idea to those who speak a variety 
of languages. Instead of communicating by words, there- 
fore, we here have a simple, easy, conventionalism, by which 
we communicate by signs ; a code of signals, in fact, which 
mean the same thing to all those who can read them. 
These dictionaries, again, are twofold; in the one part we 
can find the word we need and its corresponding number. 
