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242

Book Five

Ch. 9.

This table consists of two groups, of three alphabets each; of those alphabets both the three Former and the three Latter are so arranged that there is one Universal alphabet, which embraces the other two and constitutes the Maximum Order; a second, General, alphabet, which is written against each letter of the Universal alphabet; and a third, Particular, alphabet, which, in like way, is written against each letter of the General alphabet.  The Universal alphabet fills forty-eight pages, each letter claiming for itself two pages.  The General alphabet, constituting the Major Order, fills always two pages for each letter of the Universal alphabet, and consists of six Lines, or sixty Columns.  The Particular alphabet, or alphabet of the Minor Order, consists of two and a half Columns; whence it results that this alphabet occurs, against the General alphabet, in these two pages, twenty-four times.  If the Columns each time contained in two adjacent pages and occurring in each Line ten times, this is the construction:  In the First Station is placed the Universal letter alone.  In the second Station the Universal letter is repeated and the letter of the General alphabet is placed alongside it.  This Station of two letters occurs as many times as, in the two pages, or Order of the Major alphabet, the letter of the General alphabet begins anew.  The remaining Positions consist each of three letters, of which the first records the letter of the Universal alphabet, the second that of the General alphabet, and the third that of the Particular alphabet.  And so of the Order depending thereon:  the first letter appears  in readiness to present the first letter of the secret;  the second, to present the second letter, and the third, to present the third letter.  Now it is necessarily the case, in such an arrangement of alphabets, that many of the three-letter Stations seem to be of no possible use, inasmuch as they cannot be pronounced.  This fact, however, should in no way discredit the tabular arrangement, complete in all its parts.  For it may well happen, if you have set out with the intention of making no divisions between the words, that these three letters, which in themselves are unpronounceable, are joined by occurring at the end of one word and the beginning of the next, although, on the basis of pronunciation and word-formation, they could never occur together.  Furthermore, in certain foreign languages, as, for instance, in Bohemian and Polish, combinations of letters occur which to other languages are thoroughly abhorrent.  So much, then, for the three alphabets of the Former Order, and their functions.  The three alphabets of the Latter Order correspond, in making Transposition, to the three Former alphabets, and are found written at the left-hand side, each in its proper place.  Thus, to illustrate, in the case of the Maximum Order of the Universal alphabet, by the side of the single letter, which appears by itself in the fist Station of each leaf, is found written at a distance the Transpositive letter in capital form.  Again, inasmuch as, in the case of the Major Order of the General alphabet, to which are devoted two pages, each letter presides over two and a half Columns, or twenty-five Stations, constituting the Minor Order of the Particular alphabet: