Concerning the bi-literal cypher of Francis Bacon discovered in his works

by Elizabeth Wells Gallup

We have here a series of ninety dots and dashes, and all we need now do is to take any sentence we please—any chance fragment, whether of prose or poetry—which contains not less than ninety letters, and ignoring the ordinary use of small letters and capitals, write it in such a way as to put a capital for every dot and a small letter for every dash. Let us take, for example, the first verses of Gray’s 'Elegy,’ and write it in this manner. What we shall get is as follows:

THECU	RfEwT	OLlST	HEKNE	LlOfP	ArTiN	GDAYt
HELOW	InGhE	RdWiN	DSSLo	WLyOE	RtHeL	EaThE
PLOUG	HMANh	OMeWA	RdPlO	&c.

All the five words with which we started are here contained in our cypher; and the decipherer has only to perform the childishly simple task of putting a dot under each capital and a dash under each small letter, and he has them back again in the form given above. To illustrate the complete independence of what Bacon calls the 'infolding’ document from the 'infolded,’ let us set, one under the other, one of Gray’s lines, and some different sets of words altogether.

THECU	RfEwT	OLlST	HEKNE	LlOfP	ArTiN	GDAY
OFMAN	SfIrS	TDiSO	BEDIE	NcEaN	DtHeF	RUIT
SINGA	SoNgO	FSiXP	ENCEA	BABfU	LlOfR	YEFO	(ur) &c.

Every one of these lines, when resolved into dots and dashes, will be the same, and will read thus:

· · · · ·	|	· - · - ·	|	· · - · ·	|	· · · · ·	|	· - · - ·	|	· - · - ·
a	|	l	|	e	|	a	|
			(	· · · · -	&c.	)
				(b)	&c.

Bacon’s system differs from this merely in the fact that, instead of using the capitals and the small letters of one ordinary alphabet as the equivalents respectively of his 'a’s and 'b’s—that is to say, of his dots and dashes—he uses two italic alphabets, of capitals and small letters, complete; both the capitals and small letters of one meaning dots or 'a’s, and the capitals and small letters of the other meaning dashes or 'b’s. Let us now proceed to adopt his system a little more nearly ourselves, diverging from it only in the fact that our two complete alphabets, instead of being two slightly different varieties of italics, shall consist, the one of italics and the other of ordinary type, the italics representing the 'a’s or dots, the ordinary letters the 'b’s or dashes; and we will, as preliminary examples, imagine two cases, parallel to that which is alleged to be Bacon’s own. The following lines are Byron’s, which I quote from memory; and they are printed in accordance with the principles just laid down:

Saint Peter sat at the celestial gate;

The keys were rusty, and the lock was dull,

So little trouble had been given of late.