Wilkins is another character that I personally feel a lot of affection for. One of the curious facts about Wilkins is that twenty years earlier, he had written a book on cryptography which David Kahn, the author of The Codebreakers , has described as the first book written on cryptology in the English language. When Wilkins was a younger man living in a war-torn England, he wrote a book about how to keep secrets in a bunch of different ways. How to send secret messages and hide information. But later in his life, when England had settled down a bit politically, he turned around and tried to achieve the opposite of that. To create a system of writing that would be sort of like an anti-code. It would be so clear and logical that you could understand what it was saying even if you weren't fluent in that language.