The present war, experts assure us, has not developed anything new in the way of cipher messages, and it is now generally admitted that man has yet to devise a cipher which, given time to solve its principle, will continue long to remain a puzzle to inquiring minds. Napoleon adopted a cipher with which he communicated on many occasions with his chief-of-staff, Berthier, whose only recorded witticism is that the Emperor's handwriting was the hardest cipher he knew. By Napoleon's directions, a certain pamphlet was to be employed according to the day of the week or the date. The names of these were of course known beforehand. The instructions ran: "The first figure will give the number of the page; the second figure will give the line; the third number will serve as index to the required word, or letter, and give its position in the line indicated by the second figure; if the figure denotes a whole word, it will explain itself; if it only means a letter the fact will be shown." The whole system was found, however, to be too slow for the most impatient of commanders, and as a result was rarely called for by the Emperor. The Great War has disclosed the fact that old Indian tricks of conveying information over long distances have been resorted to, particularly the Red Man's signals by smoke which ascends at various points along a given line and the different readings of which are settled by agreement in advance among those sending and receiving the signals. It is now known that information as to "range," which, at the opening of the war, German artillerists were able to discover with a rapidity and a precision which were not less than miraculous, was being transmitted to the enemy by fixed spies in towns behind the French and British positions by means of smoking fires built upon upland territory according to indications previously agreed upon and based mainly on the number and arrangement of the different volumes of smoke. The ruse was quickly penetrated however, and thereafter German gunners proved less expert in judging distances. We also heard much at the beginning of the war, both on the Continent and in England, of the "window-light" and the "window-blind" system of communicating intelligence to the enemy on land as well as on the coastline. All these tricks have been discovered, and as a result of the most stringent exercise of precautions, as well as the insistence upon martial-law regulations at nightfall in the fighting areas, military spies have been forced to rely more largely on personal adventure and its risks, than was the case in the earlier phases of the conflict. Spies sent in advance of an army, disguised as peasants of the countryside, can keep their friends informed of the movements of the enemy by various signals also drawn from the Red Man's code, such as the breaking of trees or branches, cutting up squares of turf and disposing them in a certain order near trees, by chalk-marks not