““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) Maximo Pérez ; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad ; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur , Olimar , sulphur , the reins , the whale , the gas , the caldron , Napoleon , Agustin de Vedia . In place of five hundred, he would say nine . Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark; the last in the series were very complicated...””
