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 ridicule the "folly" of a great man, whose system he has made no very laborious effort to understand, for it seems to be built on sand, on a classification of things superficial, imperfect, and capricious, which would not have been accepted by learned men, and if accepted would have become obsolete in a quarter of a century. The syllable Co stands for all relations between human beings, and these relations are of eight kinds. What would a professor of social science now say to this? What would an ichthyologist say to Wilkins' definition of a salmon? The interest of the book lies in its being the most striking of many proofs of the wide intellectual interests, the alert and insatiable curiosity, and the extraordinary industry of its writer. It has also the pathetic interest of "love's labour lost," for who now reads the 'Real Character,' or who read it twenty years after Wilkins' death? His name was "writ in water," for he spent himself on many things, and did little because he did too much.