Seeking for things hidden, the mysterious, elusive and unexpected, has a fascination for many minds, as it has for my own, and this often prompts to greater effort than more manifest and material things would command. To this may be attributed, perhaps, the triumph over di?i culties which have seemed to me, at times, insurmountable, the solution of problems, and the following of ways tor tuous and obscure, which have been necessary to bring out, as they appear in the following pages, the hidden mes sages which Francis Bacon so securely buried in his writ ings, that three hundred years of reading and close study have not until now uncovered them.