ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Mercury within the context of Wilkins's more studied writings, outlining the ways in which it is and is not in accord with Wilkins's later language reform projects. In Mercury, Wilkins does include a brief chapter on universal language, but it is embedded within a larger exposition about secrecy in human communication. The chapter focuses on shorthand, hieroglyphs, and emblems is Wilkins's transition to his brief musings on a universal language. He moves on to a new chapter on bodily signs and gestures, of which there are two kinds: congruo and placito. The dream of a universal language was motivated, in part, by a desire to eliminate performance from certain types of human conversation and quell anxieties about tone, sarcasm, and deceit. Cryptography is not contextually equivalent to universal language; the discursive situation in which a cipher must be circulated is not impersonal or emotionally detached.
