THE I. U K AM) WORK OF HOMER. 



53 



anagrams — hut in his own line, astronomy, he had once had some- 

 thing to do with an anagram, and he thought that the anecdote 

 might illustrate the use and value of the anagram in earlier times 

 and also the danger attachingjto it. 



It would be remembered that when the telescope was first invented 

 Galileo, when he made some of his earliest discoveries, was very 

 anxious to establish his claim to the priority and yet to carry on 

 his observations and work them out yet further before he published 

 his discoveries to the world. The course he adopted was to write 

 in short epigrammatic form a statement of the discovery, and then 

 turn it into an anagram, and it was the anagram which he published. 

 Later on, when his observations were complete, he could publish the 

 solution of the anagram together with the fuller details. Othei 

 astronomers followed the same custom ; amongst them, Christian 

 Huygens, who used this method to announce his discovery of a 

 satellite of Saturn in the year 1655. Among other astronomers 

 to whom he sent this cryptogram was Dr. Wallis, a friend of 

 Sir Christopher Wren. Dr. Wallis replied by sending a long- 

 anagram to Huygens, and when Huygens published the interpreta- 

 tion of his anagram, Dr. Wallis, in answer to his challenge, gave 

 the solution of his. Both anagrams signified the same thing. Had 

 Wallis made an independent discovery Wallis never claimed it 

 for himself. Was he then attempting to work off a fraud on 

 Huygens, and if so, how did he accomplish it 1 He (the speaker) 

 had gone into the subject and came to the conclusion that Wallis 

 had simply added a number of letters to the anagram of Huygens 

 in the expectation that, when Huygens explained the meaning of 

 his anagram, he would be able to frame a sentence to the same 

 general effect from the greater number of letters at his disposal. 

 He did this, not in order to establish a spurious claim to a discovery 

 that he had not really made, but in order to prove to Huygens that 

 the method of anagrams was not a safe one, but was open to a 

 falsification which it would be difficult to expose. Letters have 

 since been published which show that this inference as to the 

 methods and motive of Wallis was correct in every particular. 



This anecdote might be sufficient to remind us that there was a 

 time when anagrams were undoubtedly used for a purpose strictl} T 

 analogous to that which Professor Margoliouth has ascribed to 

 Homer; it also pointed out that the device was not without its 



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