Excerpt from The Greatest Work of Sir Francis Bacon: Baron of Verulam, Viscount of St. Alban The theory of the existence of ciphers in English printed works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been very widely entertained. The number of those who have made more or less intelligent attempts to find a clew to, or a solution for the cipher, the presence of which they instinctively suspected, has been very great. With the majority of these the imagination has run riot, and the most fantastic anagrams, acrostics, and word puzzles have been gravely offered by these self-styled "discoverers." Without training, without method, and with nothing but a suspicion as a basis for their work, they have erected their own theory and have deliberately culled this fact and that fancy and placed them in a false setting which they have termed "proof." The utter absence in this mass of ingenious nothings of anything of serious literary or historical value has produced the inevitable result of more or less tolerant contempt and even of active prejudice on the part of scholars and students of literature, who might otherwise have been disposed to approach the subject with an open or receptive mind. Others there are who have seriously addressed themselves to the problem of ascertaining whether or not, in a given work, the cipher really existed; what its character might be; what the method of its solution, and what message it conveyed. In the few cases where the results have appeared to have been reached by scientific methods an impartial investigation has usually resulted, either in dissipating the claim made, or in discrediting the methods followed in the alleged decipherment. In all such cases speculation proved to have formed the ground work on which the theory was built, and neither the theory nor the results could stand the analytical tests of scientific scholars. Mere belief in a theory, however honest and however strong it may be, can of itself lead to nothing of scholarly value. The essential element of all productive research is the possession of a theory for which there is a basis of fact - not an effort to adapt the facts to clothe a theory. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.