years such codes have been adapted by merchants and others to communications by telegraph, and have served the purpose not only of keeping business affairs private, but also of reducing the excessive cost of telegraphic messages to distant markets. Obviously this class of ciphers presents greater difficulties to the skill of the decipherer.
Figures and other characters have been also used as letters; and with them ranges of numerals have been combined as the representatives of syllables, parts of words, words themselves, and complete phrases. Under this head must be placed the despatches of Giovanni Michael, the Venetian ambassador to England in the reign of Queen Mary, documents which have only of late years been deciphered. Many of the private letters and papers from the pen of Charles I. and his queen, who were adepts in the use of ciphers, are of the same description. One of that monarch’s letters, a document of considerable interest, consisting entirely of numerals purposely complicated, was in 1858 deciphered by Professor Wheatstone, the inventor of the ingenious crypto-machine, and printed by the Philobiblon Society. Other letters of the like character have been published in the First Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (1870). In the second and subsequent reports of the same commission several keys to ciphers have been catalogued, which seem to refer themselves to the methods of cryptography under notice. In this connexion also should be mentioned the “characters,” which the diarist Pepys drew up when clerk to Sir George Downing and secretary to the earl of Sandwich and to the admiralty, and which are frequently mentioned in his journal. Pepys describes one of them as “a great large character,” over which he spent much time, but which was at length finished, 25th April 1660; “it being,” says he, “very handsomely done and a very good one in itself, but that not truly alphabetical.”
Shorthand marks and other arbitrary characters have also been largely imported into cryptographic systems to represent both letters and words, but more commonly the latter. This plan is said to have been first put into use by the old Roman poet Ennius. It formed the basis of the method of Cicero’s freedman, Tiro, who seems to have systematized the labours of his predecessors. A large quantity of these characters have been engraved in Gruter’s Inscriptiones. The correspondence of Charlemagne was in part made up of marks of this nature. In Rees’s Cyclopaedia specimens were engraved of the cipher used by Cardinal Wolsey at the court of Vienna in 1524, of that used by Sir Thomas Smith at Paris in 1563, and of that of Sir Edward Stafford in 1586; in all of which arbitrary marks are introduced. The first English system of shorthand—Bright’s Characterie, 1588—almost belongs to the same category of ciphers. A favourite system of Charles I., used by him during the year 1646, was one made up of an alphabet of twenty-four letters, which were represented by four simple strokes varied in length, slope and position. This alphabet is engraved in Clive’s Linear System of Shorthand (1830), having been found amongst the royal manuscripts in the British Museum. An interest attaches to this cipher from the fact that it was employed in the well-known letter addressed by the king to the earl of Glamorgan, in which the former made concessions to the Roman Catholics of Ireland.
Complications have been introduced into ciphers by the employment of “dummy” letters,—“nulls and insignificants,” as Bacon terms them. Other devices have been introduced to perplex the decipherer, such as spelling words backwards, making false divisions between words, &c. The greatest security against the decipherer has been found in the use of elaborate tables of letters, arranged in the form of the multiplication table, the message being constructed by the aid of preconcerted key-words. Details of the working of these ciphers may be found in the treatises named in this article. The deciphering of them is one of the most difficult of tasks. A method of this kind is explained in the Latin and English lives of Dr John Barwick, whose correspondence with Hyde, afterwards earl of Clarendon, was carried on in cryptography. In a letter dated 20th February 1659/60, Hyde, alluding to the skill of his political opponents in deciphering, says that “nobody needs to fear them, if they write carefully in good cyphers.” In his next he allays his correspondent’s apprehensiveness as to the deciphering of their letters.
“I confess to you, as I am sure no copy could be gotten of any of my cyphers from hence, so I did not think it probable that they could be got on your side the water. But I was as confident, till you tell me you believe it, that the devil himself cannot decypher a letter that is well written, or find that 100 stands for Sir H. Vane. I have heard of many of the pretenders to that skill, and have spoken with some of them, but have found them all to be mountebanks; nor did I ever hear that more of the King’s letters that were found at Naseby, than those which they found decyphered, or found the cyphers in which they were writ, were decyphered. And I very well remember that in the volume they published there was much left in cypher which could not be understood, and which I believe they would have explained if it had been in their power.”
An excellent modification of the key-word principle was constructed by Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort.
Ciphers have been constructed on the principle of altering the places of the letters without changing their powers. The message is first written Chinese-wise, upward and downward, and the letters are then combined in given rows from left to right. In the celebrated cipher used by the earl of Argyll when plotting against James II., he altered the positions of the words. Sentences of an indifferent nature were constructed, but the real meaning of the message was to be gathered from words, placed at certain intervals. This method, which is connected with the name of Cardan, is sometimes called the trellis or cardboard cipher.
The wheel-cipher, which is an Italian invention, the string-cipher, the circle-cipher and many others are fully explained, with the necessary diagrams, in the authorities named above—more particularly by Klüber in his Kryptographik. (J. E. B.)
CRYPTOMERIA, or Japanese Cedar, a genus of conifers, containing a single species, C. japonica, native of China and
Japan, which was introduced into Great Britain by the Royal
Horticultural Society in 1844. It is described as one of the
finest trees in Japan, reaching a height of 100 or more feet,
usually divested of branches along the lower part of the trunk
and crowned with a conical head. The narrow, pointed leaves are
spirally arranged and persist for four or five years; the cones
are small, globose and borne at the ends of the branchlets, the
scales are thickened at the extremity and divided into sharply
pointed lobes, three to five seeds are borne on each scale. Cryptomeria
is extensively used in Japan for reafforesting denuded
lands, as it is a valuable timber tree; it is also planted to form
avenues along the public roads. In Veitch’s Manual of Coniferae
(ed. 2, 1900, p. 265) reference is made to “an avenue of Cryptomerias
7 m. in extent near Lake Hakone” in which “the trees
are more than 100 ft. high, with perfectly straight trunks crowned
with conical heads of foliage.” Professor C. S. Sargent, in his
Forest Flora of Japan, says, “Japan owes much of the beauty
of its groves and gardens to the Cryptomeria. Nowhere is there
a more solemn and impressive group of trees than that which
surrounds the temples and tombs at Nikko where they rise to a
height of 100 to 125 ft.; it is a stately tree with no rival except
in the sequoias of California.” Many curious varieties have
been obtained by Japanese horticulturists, including some
dwarf shrubby forms not exceeding a few feet in height. When
grown in Great Britain Cryptomeria requires a deep, well-drained
soil with plenty of moisture, and protection from cold winds.
CRYPTO-PORTICUS (Gr. κρυπτός, concealed, and Lat.
porticus), an architectural term for a concealed or covered
passage, generally underground, though lighted and ventilated
from the open air. One of the best-known examples is the
crypto-porticus under the palaces of the Caesars in Rome. In
Hadrian’s villa in Rome they formed the principal private
intercommunication between the several buildings.
CRYSTAL-GAZING, or Scrying, the term commonly applied to the induction of visual hallucinations by concentrating the gaze on any clear deep, such as a crystal or a ball of polished rock crystal. Some persons do not even find a clear deep necessary, and are content to gaze at the palm of the hand, for example, when hallucinatory pictures, as they declare, emerge.
