I found this german blog: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we...
which links to: https://archive.org/details/s9notesqueries03londuoft/page/12...
which is in reference to the original proquiritations here: https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas00mait/page/416/...
i had also never heard of this before today and wonder if people had even seriously tried to decipher this at all?
In your first link one of the comments says:
> Die Lösung müsste eigentlich mit Hilfe des Buches zu finden sein (..who worthily will hear or read this book..)
And there’s another one that says:
> jeweils 32 zahlen pro reihe. erste zeile seitenzahl zweite zeile wort? oder umgekehrt? wär mir als erstes in den sinn gekommen. leider gerade keine zeit das nachzuschauen.
So people have seen and proposed the method already in 2014 that it’s keyed to the book but had not had time to pursue a solution.
* Edit: Typo
its not quite the correct method though, the commenter suggests using the first row as a page index, and the second row as the word index, but the actual solution was using both rows as word indices within the 32 paragraphs ("Proquiritations") paired to the 32 numbers in each row
It is actually the correct method but not the correct solution. Nevertheless, the claim is not that this is the correct solution, nor that matters for the point being made.
Thank you, and SahAssar for doing the due diligence here. Like many others, I have at least a passing interest in cryptography, and I'm confident I'd never even heard of this before.
Is it wrong to presume they tried to run a similar prompt on all ciphers that come before this one in search results, and this was the only one that worked?
Which makes me wonder, other than the author and maybe two other humans on the earth, does anyone care about the cipher or the success?