Dodgeville chronicle. [volume] (Dodgeville, Wis.) 1862-current, 1866-04-26

Now, when Poe, in his remarkable story
of The Gold Beetle, tells US ''that it may
well be doubted whether human ingenuity
can construct an enigma of the kind" (he
is speaking of cryptograms), (which hu-
man ingenuity may not, by proper applica-
ton. resolve, "a proposition safe in It's
yagueness,-h must be held to speak only
bv ciphers which proceed >on plan the
very method of which affords guide 10 its
solution. Taking the cipher in his tale, for
example, each letter being represented by
distinct sign, the frequency Of recurrence
of particular signs leads to their identif-
cation with certain letters. His remarks
can hardly apply to cases where, the signs
used being purely arbitrary, their solution
requires a knowledge Of the prearranged
plan. In the cipher, the meaning of which
! / was attempting to discover, had reason
to believe that the signs represented, in an
arbitrary manner, letters or words. Ii
this view was correct, the cipher did not
! contain within itself the means by which it
might be read l could only be successful
by discovering the very books used IN It's
| construction, and the mode of using that
book, The task, at first sight, appeared
hopeless; but, upon consideration, saw
enough to induce me to proceed.
| remarked several repetitions Now, IN
a cipher constructed with the ingenuity OF
which this gave evidence, it would have
| been very easy, had each sign, by the in
! dication Of page in a book, and a line or
word in that page, represented letter only,
to pick out dozens, or even hundreds OF
| each letter, so as to avoid a recurrence OF
signs which might afford solution to the
| enigma The repetitions, on the other
hand, were too few to allow Of the posslbll-
ity of each sign representing distinct let
ter. The recurrence, but not too frequent
recurrence, of signs led me to believe that
each group of figures within bracket
represented acord [ had arrived at the
conclusion, that the number before the dot
gave the page; l was convinced that the
number after the dot represented line in
each page The highest of these numbers
was 10; now, it must be a very empty
page indeed which does not contain many
times ll2 words The second number could,
then, hardly refer to the sequence Of words,
it could only represent the line.
Now, what book would one take by pre-
ference for the construction of cipher OF
this character? In any ordinary book,
there would be extreme difficulty in finding
the particular word required, amounting,
in many cases, to impossibiity there is
only one class of book which will furnish
Immediately, without labor, every word
wanted, "a dictionary. If dictionary
were used, there would be no necessity to
indicate more than the line in which the
word, in its alphabetical order, was found ;
with other books, three numbers would be
required-for the page, the line, and the
word, respectively. This confirmed my
suspicion. By fresh examination of the
cipher, might test this view, and | there
fore arranged in a table, like the following,
the numbers before the dots, indicating by a
mark, for reason which the reader will
see presently, the place of the absent num-
Iara