In this chapter, Swift expresses a concern about the nature (and worth) of scientific study of undeserving things. Furthermore, each of the absurd projects that Gulliver reports in this chapter reverses a natural process. All the projects fail, and Swift exposes them as pointless and useless.
The Royal Society is also implicated by Gulliver’s reference to the language project. The proposal to substitute objects for words is very much like an actual proposal made by Sprat, the historian of the Society. Sprat wanted the Society’s reports to be written in a mathematically plain style—a style that would contain pictures of all the things mentioned; the style, therefore, would have almost as many pictures in it as words.
