He begins his work by a series of highly interesting observations upon general grammar, and the fundamental relations of all languages with regard to each other. He gives a learned comparative table of the relations and harmony of the Latin, the Greek, the Hebrew, the Arabian, the Sclavonian, the French, and the German. This work cannot be too highly esteemed, and assuredly was not unknown to the author of the work _Du Monde Primitif_. A Latin dictionary then follows, in which every word corresponds with one or more Arabic numeral figures arbitrarily taken. Every number is assumed as distinctive, or denoting the same word in all languages; and consequently nothing more is required than to compose a dictionary for each, similar to that which he has given for the Latin. There is likewise a table of declensions and conjugations, which presents certain determinate numbers for all the cases, moods, tenses, or persons. By means of this general disposition, when a Frenchman is desirous of writing to a German the following phrase, _La guerre est un grand mal_ (war is a great evil), he seeks in his index, _guerre_, _être_, _grand_, _mal_; and he writes the correspondent numbers, 13, 33, 67, 68. The sentence might be understood by these four characteristic numbers; but, to leave no room for ambiguity, he says, _Guerre_ is the nominative case, and finds, as the characteristic of the nominative, the Arabic figure 1. _Est_ is the third person singular of the indicative mood, present tense, of which the characteristic is 15. To _grand_, and to _mal_, belong likewise the figure 1, for the nominative case; he will therefore write 13.1 | 33.15 | 67.1 | 68.1 | where the numbers are separated by small vertical bars to prevent confusion. It may easily be conceived how, by the inverse method, the German will find in his tables the words denoted by the ciphers, which will form _Der krieg ist ein grosses uebel_. This invention of Becher, which is the same thing nearly with regard to language, as algebra is to arithmetic, is possessed of considerable simplicity, and even a few hours practice will render it easy. A great variety of attempts on this principle may be found in Sturmius, _Essais d'Expériences Curieuses_.