He told me that in 1886 he had invented an original system of numbering and that in a very few days he had gone beyond the twenty-four-thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought of once would never be lost to him. His first stimulus was, I think, his discomfort at the fact that the famous thirty-three gauchos of Uruguayan history should require two signs and two words, in place of a single word and a single sign. He then applied this absurd principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen he would say (for example) <i>Maximo Pérez</i>; in place of seven thousand fourteen, <i>The Railroad</i>; other numbers were <i>Luis Melián Lafinur</i>, <i>Olimar</i>, <i>sulphur</i>, <i>the reins</i>, <i>the whale</i>, <i>the gas</i>, <i>the caldron</i>, <i>Napoleon</i>, <i>Agustin de Vedia</i>. In place of five hundred, he would say <i>nine</i>. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark; the last in the series were very complicated...