The transmission of cipher text over the telegraph or by radio is a slow process, and many fairly good operators cannot receive such matter satisfactorily, because they listen for words and guess at letters at times. The spaced letters in American Morse are the cause of so many errors in code transmission that the War Department Code does not employ any groups using them. In fact, this code is limited to the letters A B D E F G I K M N S T U X so that there may be a minimum of such confusion. In cipher work it is necessary, under ordinary circumstances, to use any or all of the letters of the alphabet. To assist operators in keeping the text straight, it is customary to divide cipher text into groups of four, five, six or ten letters, and usually groups of five letters are used. The receiving operator may then expect five letters per group, and if he receives more or less he is sure that either he or the sending operator has made an error. This division into groups of a constant number of letters eliminates word forms and, in the mind of the non-expert, increases the difficulty of solving the cipher. But the increase in difficulty is more apparent than real; particularly, as a cipher examiner habitually finds himself dealing with ciphers without word forms, and the occurrence of a cipher with word forms usually means that he has an easy one to handle. Messages are occasionally encountered which consist partly of plain text and partly of cipher. The cipher part may or may not retain its word forms, but, when this method is used, it is clearly impossible to have a fixed number of letters in each cipher group if the word forms are not used. It is almost impossible to prevent errors of transmission in such messages, and it often requires considerable skill and labor to correct them. For those unfamiliar with the telegraph alphabets, they are given below. Messages sent by commercial or military telegraphs or buzzer lines will be transmitted with the American Morse alphabet. Those sent by radio, visual signalling or submarine cable will be transmitted by Continental Morse, known also as the International Code. Messages may be transmitted by both alphabets in course of transmission. For example, a cablegram from the Philippines to Nome, Alaska, will be transmitted by Continental Morse (commercial cable) from Manila to San Francisco, by American Morse (commercial land line) from San Francisco to Seattle, by Continental Morse (military cable) from Seattle to Valdez, by American Morse (military land line) from Valdez to Nulato and by Continental Morse (military radio) from Nulato to Nome.