Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 March 1879 — Curious Modes of Sending Secret Information. [ARTICLE]

Curious Modes of Sending Secret Information.

A curious list might be made of the strange methods employed in transmitting many important historical messages. The intelligence which enabled Cyrus to overthrow the Median Monarchy was conveyed in the body of a hare sent him as a present. The instigator of the lonian revolt against Persia sent his agent a trusty slave with verbal orders to shave his head, when the necessary instructions appeared traced on the skin beneath. During Mohammed’s wars letters of this kind were frequently plaited in the long hair of female slaves. The mediaeval fashion of writing in ink which only became visible when held to the fire is well known; but Cardinal Richelieu surpassed even this by his device of a dispatch whose alternate lines made an entirely different sense that of the letter as a whole. One Of the French Chiefs of the Fronde War concealed an important letter in a roasted crab. Warren Hastings, when tyjpckaded in Benares by Cheyte Bingh, apprised the English Army of his situation by dispatches written upon rolled-up slips pf parchment, which his messengers carried in their ears, instead of the quills usually worn there. The letter which recalled Gen. Kaufmann to the relief of Samarcand, when besieged by theßokhariotes in June, 1868, was stitched up in the sandal of a loyal native, it is eVen stated—-though the story certainly savors of a Munchausenism—that a French spy, in 1870, carried a photographic dispatch through the Germ an lines in the hollow of one of his false teeth!— N. Y. Times. “ I study two pleas," remarked the Judge..his decision.—Oweyo Record.