Gulliver's Travels (Swift)/Part 3/Chapter 5
from the Collection “Gulliver's Travels. Part 3”
The division of this retelling into sections is editorial.
Gulliver was permitted to visit the Grand Academy of Lagado, which occupied several formerly neglected houses on both sides of a street. Its warden welcomed him, and over many days he toured hundreds of rooms occupied by inventors.
Experiments in the practical arts
The first inventor Gulliver met was a thin, soot-covered man with singed hair and beard. For eight years he had tried to extract sunshine from cucumbers and seal it in bottles to warm the air during cold summers.
He expected another eight years of work to make the sunshine affordable for the governor’s gardens, but complained that cucumbers were expensive and asked Gulliver for money. Gulliver gave him a little: his host had supplied funds because the academy’s inventors commonly begged from visitors.
In a foul-smelling room, the academy’s oldest student was trying to turn human excrement back into food. Other researchers proposed turning ice into gunpowder, building houses from the roof downward, and teaching blind apprentices to distinguish painters’ colours by touch and smell. Gulliver found that the colour teacher and his pupils made frequent mistakes.
Another inventor proposed ploughing with pigs by burying food and letting the animals root for it. Trials had proved costly and troublesome, however, and produced little or no crop. A spider keeper hoped to replace silk with webs, colouring them by feeding the spiders coloured flies; he still needed to strengthen the thread. An astronomer planned a sundial that would work on a wind-driven weathercock.
A dangerous cure and a universal artist
When Gulliver mentioned a pain in his belly, his guide took him to a physician who claimed to cure it by drawing air out of the body or pumping it in with bellows. Gulliver watched the physician test both methods on a dog. The first had no visible effect; after the second, the dog died. The visitors left the physician trying to revive it with the same treatment.
Before crossing to the academy’s department of theoretical learning, Gulliver met a celebrated inventor known as the universal artist. He had spent thirty years seeking improvements to human life and employed fifty men.
His workers were attempting, among other things, to make air solid, soften marble for pillows and harden the hooves of a living horse. He himself was experimenting with sowing chaff instead of seed and preventing wool from growing on lambs, in the hope of breeding naked sheep throughout the kingdom.
A machine for composing books
Across a walkway, a professor showed Gulliver a large frame surrounded by forty pupils. The professor claimed that his machine would allow anyone to produce learned books without talent or study.
The most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.
The frame held wooden blocks bearing words in different grammatical forms. When the pupils turned its handles, the words changed places; most of the boys then searched the rows for fragments that made sense and dictated them to four scribes. They worked six hours a day, and the professor intended to assemble their collected fragments into a complete account of the arts and sciences.
He wanted public funding for five hundred frames whose operators would pool their findings. Gulliver thanked him, asked to draw the machine and promised that, if he returned home, he would credit him as its sole inventor rather than let European scholars dispute ownership.
Plans to change language and teach mathematics
At the school of languages, three professors were considering ways to improve their country’s speech. One plan would shorten long words and eliminate verbs and participles. Another would abolish words altogether, on the theory that speaking damaged the lungs: people would carry objects to express what they meant.
Women and ordinary people had threatened rebellion over the loss of speech, but some scholars adopted the system. Gulliver had seen them struggle under heavy bundles, then unpack objects in the street to hold a conversation. Its advocates also hoped that familiar objects could provide a universal language for diplomacy.
Finally, Gulliver visited the mathematics school, where a proposition and its proof were written on a wafer for a fasting student to swallow. The master believed the writing would reach the brain as the wafer digested, provided the student ate only bread and water for three days. Gulliver reported why the method had not succeeded:
they generally steal aside, and discharge it upwards before it can operate; neither have they been yet persuaded to use so long an abstinence as the prescription requires.