texts were simple substitutions using either figures or the normal Latin alphabet. When the signs in the Bacon manuscript were copied off and classified, their appearance and number were found to be consistent throughout, both internally and with the idea that the manuscript had been composed in a simple single-alphabet substitution cipher.
But to the dismay of the cryptographers, their utmost resources proved unequal to the task of extracting a sensible message in any language from the text. This was astonishing in view of the fact that some of the same cryptographers had already performed such feats as reading messages which had first been translated into Chinese and then thrown into a complex cipher—and this without any previous knowledge of Chinese. Nevertheless there the fact was. The cipher experts reported they could go no farther without a great deal of time and expense and that, even then, they would not answer for the results.
Dr. Voynich therefore turned to scientists in other fields. The drawings that accompanied the text were partly of plants, roots, seeds and the process of germination; partly of astrological symbols; partly of stars, among which Aldebaran and the group Hyades were readily recognizable. It seemed logical to believe that the captions which appeared under these drawings were descriptions of the objects, and the manuscript was accordingly submitted to several botanists and astronomers, as well as to experts in ancient languages for attack along the lines used by Grotefend and Champollion. None of them was able to make the slightest impression on it; and that simple statement may be qualified by mentioning that they put several years of effort into the task.
At this point it occurred to Dr. Voynich that Roger Bacon had also been an expert in the interpretation of the mystic-symbolical Jewish Kabbala, and that the manuscript might require interpretation in the light of cabalistic lore. He therefore turned it over to Dr. William E. Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the greatest students of medieval philosophy and science. Over the other investigators who had looked into the work Newbold possessed this advantage—that he was familiar with medieval methods of thought and turns of expression.
He knew, for example, that a good medieval thinker who wrote a manuscript in any kind of cipher would be almost certain to include in the manuscript itself a key for reading it; but the key would be couched in symbolic language and its interpretation would be loose and difficult. He began his work by a search for that key.
The last page of the manuscript held a single sentence, and this was the only sentence in the whole manuscript written with ordinary Latin characters instead of the peculiar and unreadable letters of the body of the text. “Michiton oladabas multos te feer cerc portas,” read the sentence. No process of anagramming or regarding this sentence as a simple substitution cipher would make sense of it; but if one supposed the presence of a large number of nulls, and supplied a preposition where a corner had been torn from the page, the sentence jelled out as A mihi dabas multos portas, which is clerk Latin (with an error in agreement between adjective and noun) meaning “Thou wast giving me many gates.”
In his Epistle on the Nullity of Magic Bacon had described seven systems of secret writing. One of them consisted in the inclusion of a large number of nulls in an ordinary text. Furthermore, in cabalistic lore the key to a secret, particularly a written secret, is always called a “gate.” It seemed perfectly reasonable therefore, to believe that Bacon meant to convey in this sentence that the manuscript had been written in a secret method with several keys; that is, that it was a cipher of more than one step, perhaps of several.
From this point Professor Newbold turned to the text itself. Under even an ordinary reading glass it was apparent that the wide ink-lines of the letters which composed it were carefully built up of a system of small dots, sweeps and shadings. When these were enlarged it was apparent that a regular system was perceptible in them. Dr. Newbold found twenty-two different signs, or combinations of dots and shadings, in various arrangements. Among these twenty-two he recognized the fifteen signs that composed an ancient Greek system of shorthand.
This system of shorthand was known to Bacon; he had written a Greek grammar with which the scientific world had been familiar for some time in which he described it, at the same time remarking that the Greeks had employed other systems of shorthand. The other seven signs of Dr. Newbold’s twenty-two were unfamiliar, but all were of the same general character as the fifteen shorthand signs, and careful compilation from the entire text of the manuscript showed they were probably Roger Bacon’s own invention, to fill out the Greek shorthand, which was not well calculated to express all sounds.
The Greek shorthand was a known quantity and so were its gaps; it was not, therefore, especially difficult to discover the significance of the seven additional signs, and thus to translate the entire text into letters. It made gibberish; and when every known method of solving these accumulations of letters as a simple or double substitution cipher was tried on them, the result was still gibberish.
But the key had not said merely “gates” or “two gates” which would indicate a two-step cipher; it had been specific about “many gates.” Dr. Newbold interpreted this to mean that whether or not he had been on the right track thus far, he had certainly not gone far enough. In other words there were two and possibly more steps in the cipher still ahead of him. He turned back to Bacon’s Epistle on the Nullity of Magic and examined the ciphering systems proposed there.
He never told what process of reasoning he employed at this stage, but by some process he became convinced that the next two steps in the decipherment were those of unraveling an extremely curious system of two-step simple substitutions. The first step in this process was that of doubling each letter recovered from the shorthand and writing the result in linked pairs, as though one should write the phrase “Come here” as CO, OM, ME, EH, HE, ER, RE. For each of these pairs of letters another pair was now substituted according to a regular system; and for this second pair a single letter, again according to a regular system.
The result was still gibberish. But no more than the great archaeological cryptographers would Dr. Newbold give in. He noted that the final step in these various solutions yielded a Latin alphabet; that is, one without k, w, j or y, and a count on the letters showed that the frequencies were just what they should be for Latin. Now a count of the letters in a transposition cipher has exactly the same characteristic; the count is correct, but the letters do not appear in the right order. It therefore seemed to Dr. Newbold highly probable that he had reached the last of the many gates and he attacked the letters that had resulted from his last step as though they were the elements of a regular transposition cipher.
He was still unable to find any orderly system on which they could be arranged to make sense. On the other hand, the professor knew that anagramming of names, mottoes and even of entire inscriptions was a very common practice in the Middle Ages. It occurred to him that anagramming might be successful in this instance also, and that the drawings scattered through the text were more likely than not intended to furnish a clue to such an anagramming process.
Dr. Newbold therefore attacked the illustrated pages; and now at last he began to get sense, and without going too far afield for the letters of his anagrammed text. Mostly the letters to be rearranged occurred in pairs next to one another in the Latinletter text, either in direct or reversed order. Only relatively infrequently did he have to go as far distant as twelve letters away to find one that would fill out a word, only once in a great while was the letter he needed thirty or forty letters away.
The matter he found in the text when thus developed was sufficiently startling to set the whole scientific world by the ears. It showed that Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century must have discovered and used the microscope which was not reinvented until 1677. The botanical and biological drawings in the text were described as representations of the seminiferous tubes, the microscopic cells with nuclei and even the spermatozoa—details with which modern science has come abreast only recently. But that was not all; among the astronomical drawings was a representation and a description of a spiral nebula, and another of a coronary
