Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/251

Rh gentleman of whom I am speaking, and whose locks have now become so celebrated, was good enough to explain to me from time to time many difficult questions in the science of constructing and of picking locks. He informed me that he had devised a system for defeating all these methods of picking locks, for which he proposed taking out a patent. I was, however, much gratified when I found that it was precisely the plan I had previously described in my own unpublished pamphlet.

Deciphering is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating of arts, and I fear I have wasted upon it more time than it deserves. I practised it in its simplest form when I was at school. The bigger boys made ciphers, but if I got hold of a few words, I usually found out the key. The consequence of this ingenuity was occasionally painful: the owners of the detected ciphers sometimes thrashed me, though the fault really lay in their own stupidity.

There is a kind of maxim amongst the craft of decipherers (similar to one amongst the locksmiths), that every cipher can be deciphered.

I am myself inclined to think that deciphering is an affair of time, ingenuity, and patience; and that very few ciphers are worth the trouble of unravelling them.

One of the most singular characteristics of the art of deciphering is the strong conviction possessed by every person, even moderately acquainted with it, that he is able to construct a cipher which nobody else can decipher. I have also observed that the cleverer the person, the more intimate is his conviction. In my earliest study of the subject I shared in this belief, and maintained it for many years