Again:—we say of a lady—“She is beautiful;” “She is _very_ beautiful;” or “She is _perfectly_ beautiful;” descriptions which, to one who never saw her, are no descriptions at all, for among thousands of women he has seen, probably no two are equally beautiful; and as to a _perfectly_ beautiful woman, he knows that no such being was ever created—unless by G. P. R. James, for one of the two horsemen to fall in love with, and marry at the end of the second volume. If I meet Smith in the street, and ask him—as I am pretty sure to do—“How he does?” he infallibly replies, “_Tolerable_, thank you,” which gives one no _exact_ idea of Smith’s health, for he has made the same reply to me on a hundred different occasions, on every one of which there _must_ have been some slight shade of difference in his physical economy, and of course a corresponding change in his feelings. To a man of a mathematical turn of mind, to a student and lover of the exact sciences, these inaccuracies of expression, this inability to understand _exactly_ how things are, must be a constant source of annoyance; and to one who, like myself, unites this turn of mind to an ardent love of truth, for its own sake,—the reflection that the English language does not enable us to speak the truth with exactness, is peculiarly painful. For this reason I have, with some trouble, made myself thoroughly acquainted with every ancient and modern language, in the hope that I might find some one of them that would enable me to express precisely my ideas; but the same insufficiency of adjectives exist in all except that of the Flathead Indians of Puget Sound, which consists of but forty-six words, mostly nouns, but to the constant use of which exists the objection, that nobody but that tribe can understand it. And as their literary and scientific advancement is not such as to make a residence among them, for a man of my disposition, desirable, I have abandoned the use of their language, in the belief that for me it is _hyas_, _cultus_, or, as the Spaniard hath it, _no me vale nada_. Despairing, therefore, of making new discoveries in foreign languages, I have set myself seriously to work to reform our own; and have, I think, made an important discovery, which, when developed into a system and universally adopted, will give a precision of expression, and a consequent clearness of idea, that will leave little to be desired, and will, I modestly hope, immortalise my humble name as the promulgator of the truth, and the benefactor of the human race. Before entering upon my system I will give you an account of its discovery (which perhaps I might with more modesty term an adaptation and enlargement of the idea of another), which will surprise you by its simplicity, and, like the method of standing eggs on end, of Columbus, the inventions of printing, gunpowder, and the mariner’s compass—prove another exemplification of the truth of Hannah More’s beautifully expressed sentiment—