The first thing he did was to find his "numbers" in the mass of quartered circles. And, working steadily, swiftly, but intelligently, he had, in the course of an hour, discovered, separated and jotted down, nine of the quartered disks which he believed to represent numbers; and one extra disk which he supposed to be zero. And he numbered each symbol accordingly: merely eliminating all lines except those bisecting the smaller circles. This gave him in order
The next thing to do was to find what letters those numbers, or combinations of numbers, represented.
For a while he tried English, but arrived at no convincing result. So he tried German, first making a list of the letters which were likely to occur most frequently in the written language and then trying them with the symbols which occurred most frequently in the manuscript before him.
He found that the first symbol represented the figures 21.
The twenty-first letter of the alphabet is u. He wrote it.
The next symbol was
for which he substituted the figures 14. The fourteenth letter of the alphabet is n. He had, so far, two letters, u and n, to experiment with.