Personally, I do not expect to learn that they will be convicted of the possession of such an exceptional gift of deception. Their labours smack of honesty; their conclusions betray an ingenuous credulity that calls for respect. It will, indeed, surprise most people who have made a study of their works, if it is proved that the cipher they claim to have discovered, and manipulated with such marvellous results, is a myth. But assuming that a properly-constituted committee did declare that the cipher was to be found in all the books indicated, and that the investigation corroborated the revelations made by Mrs. Gallup and Dr. Owen, there would still remain the question as to who concealed the statements in the different volumes, and whether there is any truth in them. I think, nay I claim, that in the event of the cipher being verified, and the translations being confirmed, that (_a_) The cipher could have been introduced by no other man than Bacon; and that (_b_) The whole of the statements found therein are false from beginning to end. In a searching investigation into the cipher undertaken by a correspondent of the _Times_, a single page of the cipher was tested, but the test is not, as the _Times_ claims for it, entirely convincing. The method of investigation employed is excellent. A greatly enlarged photograph is taken of a page from the _Epistle Dedicatory_ to the _Ruine of Time_ in the 1591 edition of Spenser’s _Complaints_, and the “A” and “B” letters which Mrs. Gallup herself assigns to the parts respectively are cut out and arranged in parallel columns. When these two sets of letters are seen side by side it would, indeed, be difficult for the untrained eye to distinguish any marks of dissimilarity between them. But as Mr. Mallock tells us, “although even the naked eye can be soon trained to perceive that in many cases the letters belong to different founts, yet these differences are of so minute a kind that in other cases they allude the eye without the aid of a magnifying glass; and even with the aid of a magnifying glass, the eye of the amateur, at all events, remains doubtful, and unable to assign the letters to this alphabet or to that.” The correspondent of the _Times_ leads us to infer that he has been unable to verify the existence of the cipher in the page he has tested, and Mr. Lee has declared, without hesitation, that the cipher does not exist in the Shakespeare First Folio. On the other hand, Mr. Mallock had little difficulty in distinguishing the different founts in the facsimiles from the _Novum Organum_ and Spenser’s _Complaints_. He experimented with a large number of passages, and comparing his interpretation with that of Mrs. Gallup, he found that it coincided with hers, sometimes in four cases out of seven, and not infrequently in five. “It appears to me,” Mr. Mallock writes, “to be almost inconceivable that multiplied coincidences such as these can be the work of chance, or that they can originate otherwise than