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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS);faqs.456


952




Evidence in favor of a hoax-
   . Too many players.
   . Inflated quantities of treasure.
   . Many discrepancies exist in all documents.
   . The Declaration of Independence is too hokey a key.
   . Part 3 (list of 30 names) considered too little text.
   . W.F. Friedman couldn't crack it.
   . Why even encrypt parts 1 & 3?
   . Why use multi-part text, and why different keys for each part?
   . Difficult to keep treasure in ground if 30 men know where it was buried.
   . Who'd leave it with other than your own family?
   . The Inn Keeper waited an extra 10 years before opening box with
      ciphers in it?  Who would do this, curiousity runs too deep in
      humans?
   . Why did anybody waste time deciphering paper 2, which had no title?
      1 & 3 had titles! These should have been deciphered first?
   . Why not just one single letter?
   . Statistical analysis show 1&3 similar in very obscure ways, that
      2 differs.  Did somebody else encipher it?  And why?
      Check length of keytexts, and forward/backward next word
      displacement selections.
   . Who could cross the entire country with that much gold and only
      10 men and survive back then?
   . Practically everybody who visited New Mexico before 1821, left
      by way of the Pearly Gates, as the Spanish got almost every
      tourist:-)


References:

   "The Beale Treasure: A History of a Mystery", by Peter Viemeister,
       Bedord, VA: Hamilton's, 1987.  ISBN: 0-9608598-3-7.  230 pages.
   "The Codebreakers", by David Kahn, pg 771, CCN 63-16109.
      1967.
   "Gold in the Blue Ridge, The True Story of the Beale Treasure",
      by P.B. Innis & Walter Dean Innis, Devon Publ. Co., Wash, D.C.
      1973.
    "Signature Simulation and Certain Cryptographic Codes", Hammer,
    Communications of the ACM, 14 (1), January 1971, pp. 3-14.
    "How did TJB Encode B2?", Hammer, Cryptologia, 3 (1), Jan. 1979, pp. 9-15.
    "Second Order Homophonic Ciphers", Hammer, Cryptologia, 12 (1) Jan. 1988,
    pp 11-20.

==> cryptology/Feynman.p <==
What are the Feynman ciphers?

==> cryptology/Feynman.s <==
When I was a graduate student at Caltech, Professor Feynman showed me three
samples of code that he had been challenged with by a fellow scientist at
Los Alamos and which he had not been able to crack.  I also was unable to
crack them.  I posted them to Usenet and Jack C. Morrison of JPL cracked
the first one.  It is a simple transposition cipher: split the text into
5-column pieces, then read from lower right upward.  What results are the
opening lines of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in Middle English.

1. Easier
MEOTAIHSIBRTEWDGLGKNLANEA
INOEEPEYSTNPEUOOEHRONLTIR
OSDHEOTNPHGAAETOHSZOTTENT
KEPADLYPHEODOWCFORRRNLCUE
EEEOPGMRLHNNDFTOENEALKEHH
EATTHNMESCNSHIRAETDAHLHEM
TETRFSWEDOEOENEGFHETAEDGH
RLNNGOAAEOCMTURRSLTDIDORE
HNHEHNAYVTIERHEENECTRNVIO
UOEHOTRNWSAYIFSNSHOEMRTRR
EUAUUHOHOOHCDCHTEEISEVRLS
KLIHIIAPCHRHSIHPSNWTOIISI
SHHNWEMTIEYAFELNRENLEERYI
PHBEROTEVPHNTYATIERTIHEEA
WTWVHTASETHHSDNGEIEAYNHHH
NNHTW

2. Harder
XUKEXWSLZJUAXUNKIGWFSOZRAWURO
RKXAOSLHROBXBTKCMUWDVPTFBLMKE
FVWMUXTVTWUIDDJVZKBRMCWOIWYDX
MLUFPVSHAGSVWUFWORCWUIDUJCNVT
TBERTUNOJUZHVTWKORSVRZSVVFSQX
OCMUWPYTRLGBMCYPOJCLRIYTVFCCM
UWUFPOXCNMCIWMSKPXEDLYIQKDJWI
WCJUMVRCJUMVRKXWURKPSEEIWZVXU
LEIOETOOFWKBIUXPXUGOWLFPWUSCH

3. New Message
WURVFXGJYTHEIZXSQXOBGSV
RUDOOJXATBKTARVIXPYTMYA
BMVUFXPXKUJVPLSDVTGNGOS
IGLWURPKFCVGELLRNNGLPYT
FVTPXAJOSCWRODORWNWSICL
FKEMOTGJYCRRAOJVNTODVMN
SQIVICRBICRUDCSKXYPDMDR
OJUZICRVFWXIFPXIVVIEPYT
DOIAVRBOOXWRAKPSZXTZKVR
OSWCRCFVEESOLWKTOBXAUXV
B

Chris Cole
Peregrine Systems
uunet!peregrine!chris

==> cryptology/Voynich.p <==
What are the Voynich ciphers?

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Subject: rec.puzzles FAQ, part 4 of 15
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     Frequently Asked Questions (and their answers).
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==> cryptology/Voynich.s <==
The Voynich Manuscript is a manuscript that first surfaced in the court of
Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor), who bought it for some large number of
gold pieces (600?).  Rudolf was interested in the occult, and the strange
characters and bizarre illustrations suggested that it had some deep
mystical/magical significance.  After Rudolf's court broke up, the
manuscript was sent to (if memory serves) Athanasius Kircher, with nobody
on the list having been able to read it.  It ended up in a chest of other
manuscripts in the Villa Mondragone [?] in Italy, and was discovered there
by Wilfred Voynich, a collector, in about 1910 or so.  He took it to a
linguist who wasn't a cryptanalyst, who identified it as a work by the
12th century monk Roger Bacon and produced extended bogus decryptions based
on shorthand characters he saw in it.  A great deal of effort by the best
cryptanalysts in the country hasn't resulted in any breakthrough.  William
F. Friedman (arguably the best) thought it was written in an artificial
language.  I believe the manuscript is currently in the Beinecke Rare
Book Collection at [Harvard?].

Mary D'Imperio's paper is scholarly and detailed, and provides an
excellent starting point for anyone who is interested in the subject.
David Kahn's "The Codebreakers" has enough detail to tell you if you're
interested; it also has one or more plates showing the script and some
illustrations.  I believe D'Imperio's monograph has been reprinted by
Aegean Park Press.  A number of people have published their own ideas
about it, including Brumbaugh, without anybody agreeing.  A recent
publication from Aegean Park Press offers another decryption; I haven't
seen that one.

If you want *my* guess, it's a hoax made up by Edmund Kelley and an
unnamed co-conspirator and sold to Rudolf through the reputation of John
Dee (Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer).
--
    Jim Gillogly
    {hplabs, ihnp4}!sdcrdcf!randvax!jim
    [e-mail]

I read "Labyrinths of Reason" by William Poundstone recently.  I'm
posting this to so many newsgroups in part to recommend this book, which,
while of a popular nature, gives a good analysis of a wide variety of
paradoxes and philosophical quandaries, and is a great read.

Anyway, it mentions something called the Voynich manuscript, which is
now at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
It's a real pity that I didn't know about this manuscript and go see it
when I was at Yale.

The Voynich manuscript is apparently very old.  It is a 232-page illuminated
manuscript written in a cipher that has never been cracked.  (That's
what Poundstone says - but see my hypothesis below.)  If I may quote
Poundstone's charming description, "Its author, subject matter, and
meaning are unfathomed mysteries.  No one even knows what language the
text would be in if you deciphered it.  Fanciful picutres of nude women,
peculiar inventions, and nonexistent flora and fauna tantalize the
would-be decipherer.   Color sketches in the exacting style of a
medieval herbal depict blossoms and spices that never spring from earth
and constellations found in no sky.  Plans for weird, otherworldly
plumbing show nymphets frolicking in sitz baths connected with
elbow-macaroni pipes.  The manuscript has the eerie quality of a
perfectly sensible book from an alternate universe."

There is a picture of one page in Poundstone's book.  It's written in a
flowing script using "approximately 21 curlicued symbols," some of which
are close to the Roman alphabet, but others of which supposedly resemble
Cyrillic, Glagolitic, and Ethiopian.  There is one tiny note in Middle
High German, not necessarily by the original author, talking about the
Herbal of Matthiolaus.  Some astrology charts in the manuscript have the
months labeled in Spanish.  "What appears to be a cipher table on the
first page has long faded into illegibility," and on the other hand, some
scholars have guessed that a barely legible inscription on the *last*
page is a key!

It is said to have "languished for a long time at the Jesuit College of
Mondragone in Frascati, Italy.  Then in 1912 it was purchased by Wilfred
M. Voynich, a Polish-born scientist and bibliophile...  Voynich was the
son-in-law of George Boole, the logician..."  A letter written in 1666
claims that Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia (1552-1612) bought
the manuscript for 600 gold ducats.  He may have bought it from Dr.
John Dee, the famous astrologer.  Rudolf thought the manuscript was
written by Roger Bacon!   [Wouldn't it more likely have been written by
Dee, out to make a fast ducat?]

"Many of the most talented military code breakers of this century have
tried to decipher it as a show of prowess.  Herbert Yardley, the
American code expert who solved the German cipher in WW1 and who cracked
a Japanese diplomatic cipher without knowing the Japanese language,
failed with the Voynich manuscript.  So did John Manly, who unscrambled
the Waberski cipher, and William Friedman, who defeated the Japanese
"purple code" of the 1940's.  Computers have been drafted into the
effort in recent years, to no avail."

Poundstone goes on to describe a kook, Newbold, who was apparently driven
batty in his attempt to crack the manuscript.  He then mentions that one
Leo Levitov also claimed in 1987 to crack the cipher, saying that it was
the text of a 12th-century cult of Isis worshipers, and that it
describes a method of euthanasia by opening a vein in a warm bathtub,
among other morbid matters.  According to Levitov's translation the text
begins:

"ones treat the dying each the man lying deathly ill the one person who
aches Isis each that dies treats the person"

Poundstone rejects this translation.

According to Poundstone, a William Bennett (see below) has analysed the
text with a computer and finds that its entropy is less than any known
European language, and closer to those of Polynesian languages.

My wild hypothesis, on the basis solely of the evidence above, is this.
Perhaps the text was meant to be RANDOM.  Of course humans are lousy at
generating random sequences.  So I'm wondering how attempted random
sequences (written in a weird alphabet) would compare statistically with
the Voynich manuscript.

Anyway, the only source Poundstone seems to cite, other than the
manuscript itself, is Leo Levitov's "Solution of the Voynich Manuscript,
A Liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult
of Isis," Laguna Hills, Calif., Aegean Park Press, 1987, and William
Ralph Bennett Jr.'s "Scientific and Engineering Problem-Solving with the
Computer," Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall 1976.

I will check the Bennett book; the other sounds hard to get ahold of!  I
would LOVE any further information about this bizarre puzzle.  If anyone
knows Bennett and can get samples of the Voynich manuscript in
electronic form, I would LOVE to get my hands on it.

Also, I would appreciate any information on:

Voynich
The Jesuit College of Mondragone
Rudolf II
The letter by Rudolf II (where is it? what does it say?)
The attempts of Yardley, Friedman and Manly
The Herbal of Matthiolaus

and, just for the heck of it, the "Waberski cipher" and the "purple
code"!

This whole business sounds like a quagmire into which angels would fear
to tread, but a fool like me finds it fascinating.

  -- sender's name lost (!?)

To counter a few hypotheses that were suggested here:

The Voynich Manuscript is certainly not strictly a polyalphabetic cipher
like Vigenere or Beaufort or (the one usually called) Porta, because of
the frequent repetitions of "words" at intervals that couldn't be
multiples of any key length.  I suppose one could imagine that it's an
interrupted key Vig or something, but common elements appearing at places
other than the beginnings of words would seem to rule that out.  The I.C.
is too high for a digraphic system like (an anachronistic) Playfair in any
European language.

One of the most interesting Voynich discoveries was made by Prescott Currier,
who discovered that the two different "hands" (visually distinct handwriting)
used different "dialects": that is, the frequencies for pages written in
one hand are different from those written in the other.  I confirmed this
observation by running some correlation coefficients on the digraph matrices
for the two kinds of pages.

W. F. Friedman ("The Man Who Broke Purple") thought the Voynich was
written in some artificial language.  If it's not a hoax, I don't see any
evidence to suggest he's wrong.  My personal theory (yeah, I've offered
too many of those lately) is that it was constructed by Edward Kelley,
John Dee's scryer, with somebody else's help (to explain the second
handwriting) -- perhaps Dee himself, although he's always struck me as a
credulous dupe of Kelley rather than a co-conspirator (cf the Angelic
language stuff).

The best source I know for the Voynich is Mary D'Imperio's monograph
"The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma", which is available from
Aegean Park Press.

--
 Jim Gillogly
 [e-mail]


Here's an update on the Voynich manuscript.  This will concentrate on
sources for information on the Voynich; later I will write a survey of
what I have found out so far.  I begin with some references to the
case, kindly sent to me by Karl Kluge (the first three) and Micheal Roe
<[e-mail]> (the rest).

 TITLE     Thirty-five manuscripts : including the St. Blasien psalter, the
           Llangattock hours, the Gotha missal, the Roger Bacon (Voynich)
           cipher ms.
           Catalogue ; 100
           35 manuscripts.
 CITATION  New York, N.Y. : H.P. Kraus, [1962] 86 p., lxvii p. of plates, [1]
           leaf of plates : ill. (some col.), facsims. ; 36 cm.
 NOTES     "30 years, 1932-1962" ([28] p.) in pocket. Includes indexes.
 SUBJECT   Manuscripts Catalogs.
           Illumination of books and manuscripts Catalogs.

 AUTHOR    Brumbaugh, Robert Sherrick, 1918-
 TITLE     The most mysterious manuscript : the Voynich "Roger Bacon" cipher
           manuscript / edited by Robert S. Brumbaugh.
 CITATION  Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, c1978. xii, 175 p.
           : ill. ; 22 cm.
 SUBJECT   Bacon, Roger, 1214?-1294.
           Ciphers.

 AUTHOR    D'Imperio, M. E.
 TITLE     The Voynich manuscript : an elegant enigma / M. E. D'Imperio.
 CITATION  Fort George E. Mead, Md. : National Security Agency/Central Security
           Service, 1978. ix, 140 p. : ill. ; 27 cm.
 NOTES     Includes index. Bibliography: p. 124-131.
 SUBJECT   Voynich manuscript.       [NOTE: see alternate publisher below!]

@book{Bennett76,
author = "Bennett, William Ralph",
title = "Scientific and Engineering Problem Solving with the Computer",
address = "Englewood Cliffs, NJ",
publisher =  "Prentice-Hall",
year = 1976}

@book{dImperio78,
author = "D'Imperio, M E",
title = "The Voynich manuscript: An Elegant Enigma",
publisher= "Aegean Park Press",
year = 1978}

@article{Friedman62,
author = "Friedman, Elizebeth Smith",
title = "``The Most Mysterious Manuscript'' Still Mysterious",
booktitle = "Washington Post",
month = "August 5",
notes = "Section E",
pages = "1,5",
year = 1962}

@book{Kahn67,
author = "Kahn, David",
title = "The Codebreakers",
publisher = "Macmillan",
year = "1967"}

@article{Manly31,
author = "Manly, John Matthews",
title = "Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS",
boooktitle = "Speculum VI",
pages = "345--91",
year = 1931}

@article{ONeill44,
author = "O'Neill, Hugh",
title = "Botanical Remarks on the Voynich MS",
journal = "Speculum XIX",
pages = "p.126",
year = 1944}

@book{Poundstone88,
author = "Poundstone, W.",
title = "Labyrinths of Reason",
publisher = "Doubleday",
address = "New York",
month = "November",
year = 1988}

@article{Zimanski70,
author = "Zimanski, C.",
title = "William Friedman and the Voynich Manuscript",
journal = "Philological Quarterly",
year = "1970"}

@article{Guy91b,
author = "Guy, J. B. M.",
title = "Statistical Properties of Two Folios of the Voynich Manuscript",
journal = "Cryptologia",
volume = "XV",
number = "4",
pages = "pp. 207--218",
month = "July",
year = 1991}

@article{Guy91a,
author = "Guy, J. B. M.",
title = "Letter to the Editor Re Voynich Manuscript",
journal = "Cryptologia",
volume = "XV",
number = "3",
pages = "pp. 161--166",
year = 1991}

This is by no means a complete list.  It doesn't include Newbold's
(largely discredited) work, nor work by Feely and Stong.
In addition, there is the proposed decryption by Leo Levitov (also
largely discredited):

"Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A Liturgical Manual for the
Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis_, available from
Aegean Park Press, P. O. Box 2837, Laguna Hills CA 92654-0837."

According to Earl Boebert, this book is reviewed in
Cryptologia XII, 1 (January 1988).  I should add that Brumbaugh's book
above gives a third, also largely discredited, decryption of the Voynich.

According to [e-mail], Aegean Park Press does mail-order
business and can be reached at the above address or at 714-586-8811
(an answering machine).

Micheal Roe has explained how one get microfilms of the whole
manuscript:

"The Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University sells a microfilm of the
manuscript. Their catalog number for the original is MS 408, ``The Voynich
`Roger Bacon' Cipher MS''. You should write to them.

The British Library [sic - should be Museum] has a photocopy of the MS
donated to them by John Manly circa 1931. They apparently lost it until
12 March 1947, when it was entered in the catalogue (without
cross-references under Voynich, Manly, Roger Bacon or any other useful
keywords...)

It appears as ``MS Facs 461: Positive rotographs of a Cipher MS (folios 1-56)
acquired in 1912 by Wilfred M. Voynich in Southern Europe.'
Correspondance between Newbold, Manly and various British Museum experts
appears under ``MS Facs 439: Leaves of the Voynich MS, alleged to be in
Roger Bacon's cypher, with correspondence and other pertinent material''
See John Manly's 1931 article in Speculum and Newbold's book for what the
correspondance was about! There are also a number of press cuttings.

Both of these in are in the manuscript collection, for which special
permission is needed in addition to a normal British Library reader's pass."

Also, Jim Gillogly has been extremely kind in making available
part of the manuscript that was transcribed and keyed in by Mary
D'Imperio (see above), using Prescott Currier's notation.  It appears to
consist of 166 of the total 232 pages.    I hope to do some statistical
studies on this, and I encourage others to do the same and let me know
what they find!  As Jim notes, the file is pub/jim/voynich.tar.Z and is
available by anonymous ftp at rand.org.   I've had a little trouble with
this file at page 165, where I read "1650voynich   664" etc., with page
166 missing.  If anyone else notes this let Jim or I know.

Jim says he has confirmed by correlations between digraph matrices the
discovery by Prescott Crurrier that the manuscript is written in two
visibly distinct hands.  These are marked "A" and "B" in the file
voynich.tar.Z.

Because of the possibility that the Voynich is nonsense, it would be
interesting to compare the Voynich to the Codex Seraphinianus, which
Kevin McCarty kindly reminded me of.  He writes:

"This is very odd.  I know nothing of the Voynich manuscript, but
I know of something which sounds very much like it and was created
by an Italian artist, who it now seems was probably influenced
by this work.   It a book titled "Codex Seraphinianus", written in
a very strange script.  The title page contains only the book's title
and the publisher's name: Abbeville Press, New York.  The only clues
in English (in *any* recognizable language) are some blurbs on the
dust jacket that identify it as a modern work of art, and the copyright
notice, in fine print, which reads

"Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Serafini, Luigi.
    Codex Seraphinianus.

 1. Imaginary Languages. 2. Imaginary societies.
 3. Encyclopedias and Dictionaries-- Miscellanea.

I. Title.
PN6381.S4    1983    818'.5407    83.-7076
ISBN 0-89659-428-9

First American Edition, 1983.
Copyright (c) 1981 by Franco Maria Ricci.  All rights reserved
by Abbeville Press.  No part of this book may be reproduced...
without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should
be addressed to Abbeville Press, Inc., 505 Park Avenue, New York
10022. Printed and bound in Italy."

The book is remarkable and bizarre.  It *looks* like an encyclopedia
for an imaginary world.  Page after page of beautiful pictures
of imaginary flora and fauna, with annotations and captions in
a completely strange script.  Machines, architecture, umm, 'situations',
arcane diagrams, implements, an archeologist pointing at a Rosetta stone
(with phony hieroglyphics), an article on penmanship (with unorthodox
pens), and much more, finally ending with a brief index.

The script in this work looks vaguely similar to the Voynich orthography
shown in Poundstone's book (I just compared them); the alphabets
look quite similar, but the Codex script is more cursive and less
bookish than Voynich.  It runs to about 200 pages, and probably
ought to provide someone two things:
- a possible explanation of what the Voynich manuscript is
  (a highly imaginative work of art)
- a textual work which looks like it was inspired by it and might
  provide an interesting comparison for statistical study."

I suppose it would be too much to hope that someone has already
transcribed parts of the Codex, but nonetheless, if anyone has any in
electronic form, I would love to have a copy for comparative statistics.

Jacques Guy kindly summarized his analysis (in Cryptologia, see above)
of the Voynich as follows:

"I transcribed the two folios in Bennett's book and submitted them to
letter-frequency counts, distinguishing word-initial, word-medial,
word-final, isolated, line-initial, and line-final positions. I also
submitted that transcription to Sukhotin's algorithm which, given a text
written in an alphabetical system, identifies which symbols are vowels and
which are consonants. The letter transcribed CT in Bennett's system came
out as a consonant, the one transcribed CC as vowel. Now it so happens
that CT is exactly the shape of the letter "t" in the Beneventan script
(used in medieval Spain and Northern Italy), and CC is exactly the shape
of "a" in that same script. I concluded that the author had a knowledge
of that script, and that the values of CT and CC probably were "t" and
"a". There's a lot more, but more shaky."

By popular demand I've put a machine-readable copy of the Voynich Manuscript
up for anonymous ftp:

    Host: rand.org
    File: pub/jim/voynich.tar.Z

It uses Prescott Currier's notation, and was transcribed by Mary D'Imperio.
If you use it in any analysis, be sure to give credit to D'Imperio, who put
in a lot of effort to get it right.

--
 Jim Gillogly
 [e-mail]



This post is essentially a summary of the fruit of a short research
quest at the local library.

Brief description of the Voynich manuscript:

The Voynich manuscript was bought (in about 1586) by the Holy Roman
Emperor Rudolf II.  He believed it to be the work of Roger Bacon
an english 13th century philosopher.  The manuscript consisted of about
200 pages with many illustrations.  It is believed that the manuscript
contains some secret scientific or magical knowledge since it is entirely
written in secret writing (presumably in cipher).

The Voynich Manuscript is often abbreviated "Voynich MS" in all of the
books I have read on Voynich.  This is done without explanation.  I
suppose it is just a convention started by the founding analysts of
the manuscript to call it that.

William R. Newbold, one of the original analysts of the Voynich MS after
Voynich, claims to have arrived at a partial decipherment of the entire
manuscript.   His book The Cipher of Roger Bacon [2] contains a history
of the unravelment of the cipher *and* keys to the cipher itself.  As well
as translations of several pages of the manuscript.

Newbold derives his decipherment rules through a study of the medeival
mind (which he is a leading scholar in) as well as the other writings
of Roger Bacon.  Says Newbold, ciphers in Roger Bacon's writings are not
new, as Bacon discusses in other works the need for monks to use
encipherment to protect their knowlege.

Newbold includes many partial decipherments from the Voynich MS but most of
them are presented in Latin only.

Newbolds deciphering rules (from The Cipher of Roger Bacon [1])
---------------------------------------------------------------
1. Syllabification: [double all but the first and last letters of each
word, and divide the product into biliteral groups or symbols.]
2. Translation: [translate these symbols into the alphabetic values]
3. Reversion: [change the alphabetic values to the phonetic values, by use
of the reversion alphabet]
4. Recomposition: [ rearrange the letters in order, and thus recompose the
true text].

The text I copied this from failed to note step 0 which was:
0. Ignore. [ignore the actual shape of every symbol and analyze only the
(random?) properties of the direction of swirl and crosshatch patterns
of the characters when viewed under a microscope.  14 distinct contruction
patterns can be identified among the (much larger) set of symbols]

John M. Manly in The Most Mysterious Manuscript [3], suggests that Newbold's
method of decipherment is totally invalid.  Manly goes on to show that it
is not difficult to obtain *ANY DESIRABLE* message from the Voynich MS
using Newbold's rules.  He shows that after fifteen minutes deciphering
a short sequence of letters he arrives at the plaintext message
    "Paris is lured into loving vestals..."
and quips that he will furnish a continuation of the translation upon
request!

The reason I have spent so much time explaining Newbold's method is that
Newbold presents the most convincing argument for how he arrived at his
conclusions.  Notwithstanding the fact that he invented the oija board of
deciphering systems.

Joseph Martin Feely, in his book on the Voynich MS [2] , claims to have
found the key to deciphering at least one page of the Voynich MS.  His entire
book on the topic of the Voynich manuscript is devoted to the deciphering of
the single page 78.  Feely presents full tables of translation of the page 78
from its written form into latin (and english).  It seems that Feely was using
the exhaustive analysis method to determine the key.

Feely suggests the following translation of (the first fiew lines of) page
78 of the Voynich MS:

"the combined stream when well humidified, ramifies; afterward it is broken
down smaller; afterward, at a distance, into the fore-bladder it comes [1].
Then vesselled, it is after-a-while ruminated: well humidified it is
clothed with veinlets [2].  Thence after-a-bit they move down; tiny
teats they provide (or live upon) in the outpimpling of the veinlets.
They are impermiated; are thrown down below; they are ruminated; they are
feminized with the tiny teats.  .... "

    ... and so on for three more pages of "english plaintext".

The descriptions by Feely say that this text is accompanied in the Voynich MS
by an illustration that (he says) is unmistakably the internal female
reproductive organs (I saw the plate myself and they DO look like fallopian
tubes *AFTER* I read the explanation).

The most informative work that I found (I feel) was "The Most Mysterious
Manuscript".   Of the five books on Voynich that I found, this was the only
one that didn't claim to have found the key but was, rather, a collection
of essays on the history of the Voynich MS and criticisms of various attempts
by earlier scientists.  It was also the *latest* book that I was able to
consult, being published in 1978.