In the following pages will be found the statement of its discovery in the Works of Bacon, and discussions by the public Press. Inquries, objections and answers from so many different points of view would seem to cover every phase of the matter. Unreasoning prejudice is, of course, beyond reply. To those of open mind this exposition of the discovery will be most interesting. Its importance cannot be overestimated. A new literature, buried these three hundred years, as interesting as it is surprising, has been unearthed. Its authenticity is placed beyond question.
BI-LITERAL CYPHER OF FRANCIS BACON.
Baconiana.
To thousands who tread unthinkingly the earth’s fair surface, the mineral constitution of the globe, or the history of its formation, is as a sealed book. The geologist, however, pointing out the parallel lines in a rock will tell us they indicate the glacial period. From a piece of coal he will describe the forests and plant life which formed the coal measures of the carboniferous era. He finds where volcanic action reveals strata from unknown depths, and reads their history like a printed page.
In architecture, the ages stamped, each its own, peculiarities upon column and temple, and the student of that science will declare the date of the ruins which accident or excavation have brought to view.
We see a tapering obelisk inscribed with hieroglyphics, and say this is Egyptian. The eye educated to discriminate will study the writings upon the stone that has been preserved from remote ages, and will say, this is the hieroglyphic proper; this ideographic; this the phonetic, or of this or that peculiar character, this is the Egyptian Hieratic; this the Phœnecian; these the Cuniform characters of the ancient Persian or Assyrian inscriptions, and few will challenge the correctness of the decipherings.
The savant will tell us that the environment, the nationality and personality are unmistakably impressed upon the literature of every country, mark the times and character of its people and the stage of its progress. Year by year, decade by decade, age by age, time passed and wrought its changes until that period was reached in which the English people of the present day are interested because of the discussion which it has aroused—the latter part of the XVIth and beginning of the XVIIth Centuries. Knighthood had passed its flower but the English Court still loved the tales of Knightly deeds and found delight in the fancies of the Shepheard’s Calender and Faerie Queene. Legitimate drama began to develop, replacing masques and mysteries. History was written and its lessons emphasized by dramatic representations. Essays brought the truth “home to men’s bosoms and business,” and experimental science made clear that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”
This was the age when Francis Bacon lived and wrote, and fantasy, and essay, and drama began to appear, at first anonymously, and then under names of men as authors, whose lives, habits and capabilities presented the most incongruous contrasts to the works produced. They were days of peril and secret intrigue, when the words from the lips of the Courtier were often farthest removed from the thought of the brain, and when all secret communications were committed to cipher.
Of all the weighty secrets of that time, none save the Queen of England herself bore any more momentous than that prolific author. So momentous were they that few traces of their import found place upon the public records in connected or intelligible form, and were supposed to have died with those most intimately connected with them.
Bacon placed in his De Augmentis Scientiarum the key to a simple but most useful Cipher, of his own invention, and we now find that through its instrumentality the secrets so jealously guarded in his life time, were committed to his works, and waited only the hand and vision of a decipherer to be revealed to the ages which should follow.