There is a saying in the American Secret Service that no cipher can be invented to escape for long an intelligent pursuit after the key. The cipher of Roger Bacon, however, England's famous 18th century monk. has passed through nearly 800 years ct seavcher's hands and the clue is only now beginning to be detected. But, then, Bacon must himsrlt have spent years upon his cipher, and purposely entangled it into six ciphers within ciphers, so that it is a marvel that! human ingenuity has been able to find any of the six keys necessary to unlock a single door of Bacon's concealed wisdom.
Professor William R. Newbold. of the University of Pennsylvania, who has been spending two years tracing all manner of clues through the Bacon cipher, is still puzzled by most of the text. The manuscript. which was brought te to America by Wilfrid M. de Voynich from the Duke of Parma archives in Italy, seems to the unaccustomed eye to contain bent 20,000 or 30,000 words But. each word is part of a shorthand system, and when the tangle is upravelled the iotxl number of words will probably be nearly 1,000,000.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.