Budget of Paradoxes/E

THE ARISTOCRAT AS A SCIENTIST.

 * Copernicans of all sorts convicted ... to which is added a Treatise of the Magnet. By the Hon. Edw. Howard, of Berks. London, 1705, 8vo.

Not all the blood of all the Howards will gain respect for a writer who maintains that eclipses admit no possible explanation under the Copernican hypothesis, and who asks how a man can "go 200 yards to any place if the moving superficies of the earth does carry it from him?" Horace Walpole, at the beginning of his Royal and Noble Authors, has mottoed his book with the Cardinal's address to Ariosto, "Dove diavolo, Messer Ludovico, avete pigliato tante coglionerie?" Walter Scott says you could hardly pick out, on any principle of selection—except badness itself, he means of course—the same number of plebeian authors whose works are so bad. But his implied satire on aristocratic writing forgets two points. First, during a large period of our history, when persons of rank condescended to write, they veiled themselves under "a person of honor," "a person of quality," and the like, when not wholly undescribed. Not one of these has Walpole got; he omits, for instance, Lord Brounker's translation of Descartes on Music. Secondly, Walpole only takes the heads of houses: this cuts both ways; he equally eliminates the Hon. Robert Boyle and the precious Edward Howard. The last writer is hardly out of the time in which aristocracy suppressed its names; the avowal was then usually meant to make the author's greatness useful to the book. In our day, literary peers and honorables are very favorably known, and contain an eminent class. They rough it like others, and if such a specimen as Edw. Howard were now to appear, he would be greeted with


 * "Hereditary noodle! knowest thou not
 * Who would be wise, himself must make him so?"

THE LONGITUDE PROBLEM.

 * A new and easy method to find the longitude at land or sea. London, 1710, 4to.

This tract is a little earlier than the great epoch of such publications (1714), and professes to find the longitude by the observed altitudes of the moon and two stars.


 * A new method for discovering the longitude both at sea and land, humbly proposed to the consideration of the public. By Wm. Whiston and Humphry Ditton. London, 1714, 8vo.

This is the celebrated tract, written by the two Arian heretics. Swift, whose orthodoxy was as undoubted as his meekness, wrote upon it the epigram—if, indeed, that be epigram of which the point is pious wish—which has been so often recited for the purity of its style, a purity which transcends modern printing. Perhaps some readers may think that Swift cared little for Whiston and Ditton, except as a chance hearing of their plan pointed them out as good marks. But it was not so: the clique had their eye on the guilty pair before the publication of the tract. The preface is dated July 7; and ten days afterwards Arbuthnot writes as follows to Swift:

"Whiston has at last published his project of the longitude; the most ridiculous thing that ever was thought on. But a pox on him! he has spoiled one of my papers of Scriblerus, which was a proposition for the longitude not very unlike his, to this purpose; that since there was no pole for east and west, that all the princes of Europe should join and build two prodigious poles, upon high mountains, with a vast lighthouse to serve for a polestar. I was thinking of a calculation of the time, charges, and dimensions. Now you must understand his project is by lighthouses, and explosion of bombs at a certain hour."

The plan was certainly impracticable; but Whiston and Ditton might have retorted that they were nearer to the longitude than their satirist to the kingdom of heaven, or even to a bishopric. Arbuthnot, I think, here and elsewhere, reveals himself as the calculator who kept Swift right in his proportions in the matter of the Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, etc. Swift was very ignorant about things connected with number. He writes to Stella that he has discovered that leap-year comes every four years, and that all his life he had thought it came every three years. Did he begin with the mistake of Cæsar's priests? Whether or no, when I find the person who did not understand leap-year inventing satellites of Mars in correct accordance with Kepler's third law, I feel sure he must have had help.

THE AURORA BOREALIS.

 * An essay concerning the late apparition in the heavens on the 6th of March. Proving by mathematical, logical, and moral arguments, that it cou'd not have been produced meerly by the ordinary course of nature, but must of necessity be a prodigy. Humbly offered to the consideration of the Royal Society. London, 1716, 8vo.

The prodigy, as described, was what we should call a very decided and unusual aurora borealis. The inference was, that men's sins were bringing on the end of the world. The author thinks that if one of the old "threatening prophets" were then alive, he would give "something like the following." I quote a few sentences of the notion which the author had of the way in which Ezekiel, for instance, would have addressed his Maker in the reign of George the First:

"Begin! Begin! O Sovereign, for once, with an effectual clap of thunder.... O Deity! either thunder to us no more, or when you thunder, do it home, and strike with vengeance to the mark.... 'Tis not enough to raise a storm, unless you follow it with a blow, and the thunder without the bolt, signifies just nothing at all.... Are then your lightnings of so short a sight, that they don't know how to hit, unless a mountain stands like a barrier in their way? Or perhaps so many eyes open in the firmament make you lose your aim when you shoot the arrow? Is it this? No! but, my dear Lord, it is your custom never to take hold of your arms till you have first bound round your majestic countenance with gathered mists and clouds."


 * The principles of the Philosophy of the Expansive and Contractive Forces ... By Robert Greene, M.A., Fellow of Clare Hall. Cambridge, 1727, folio.

Sanderson writes to Jones, "The gentleman has been reputed mad for these two years last past, but never gave the world such ample testimony of it before." This was said of a former work of Greene's, on solid geometry, published in 1712, in which he gives a quadrature. He gives the same or another, I do not know which, in the present work, in which the circle is $$\scriptstyle 3\frac{1}{5}$$ diameters. This volume is of 981 good folio pages, and treats of all things, mental and material. The author is not at all mad, only wrong on many points. It is the weakness of the orthodox follower of any received system to impute insanity to the solitary dissentient: which is voted (in due time) a very wrong opinion about Copernicus, Columbus, or Galileo, but quite right about Robert Greene. If misconceptions, acted on by too much self-opinion, be sufficient evidence of madness, it would be a curious inquiry what is the least per-centage of the reigning school which has been insane at any one time. Greene is one of the sources for Newton being led to think of gravitation by the fall of an apple: his authority is the gossip of Martin Folkes. Probably Folkes had it from Newton's niece, Mrs. Conduitt, whom Voltaire acknowledges as his authority. It is in the draft found among Conduitt's papers of memoranda to be sent to Fontenelle. But Fontenelle, though a great retailer of anecdote, does not mention it in his éloge of Newton; whence it may be suspected that it was left out in the copy forwarded to France. D'Israeli has got an improvement on the story: the apple "struck him a smart blow on the head": no doubt taking him just on the organ of causality. He was "surprised at the force of the stroke" from so small an apple: but then the apple had a mission; Homer would have said it was Minerva in the form of an apple. "This led him to consider the accelerating motion of falling bodies," which Galileo had settled long before: "from whence he deduced the principle of gravity," which many had considered before him, but no one had deduced anything from it. I cannot imagine whence D'Israeli got the rap on the head, I mean got it for Newton: this is very unlike his usual accounts of things. The story is pleasant and possible: its only defect is that various writings, well known to Newton, a very learned mathematician, had given more suggestion than a whole sack of apples could have done, if they had tumbled on that mighty head all at once. And Pemberton, speaking from Newton himself, says nothing more than that the idea of the moon being retained by the same force which causes the fall of bodies struck him for the first time while meditating in a garden. One particular tree at Woolsthorpe has been selected as the gallows of the appleshaped goddess: it died in 1820, and Mr. Turnor kept the wood; but Sir D. Brewster brought away a bit of root in 1814, and must have had it on his conscience for 43 years that he may have killed the tree. Kepler's suggestion of gravitation with the inverse distance, and Bouillaud's proposed substitution of the inverse square of the distance, are things which Newton knew better than his modern readers. I discovered two anagrams on his name, which are quite conclusive; the notion of gravitation was not new; but Newton went on. Some wandering spirit, probably whose business it was to resent any liberty taken with Newton's name, put into the head of a friend of mine eighty-one anagrams on my own pair, some of which hit harder than any apple.

DE MORGAN ANAGRAMS.
This friend, whom I must not name, has since made it up to about 800 anagrams on my name, of which I have seen about 650. Two of them I have joined in the title-page: the reader may find the sense. A few of the others are personal remarks.


 * "Great gun! do us a sum!"

is a sneer at my pursuits: but,


 * "Go! great sum! $$\scriptstyle\int a u^n du$$"

is more dignified.


 * "Sunt agro! gaudemus,"

is happy as applied to one of whom it may be said:


 * "Ne'er out of town; 'tis such a horrid life;
 * But duly sends his family and wife."


 * "Adsum, nugator, suge!"

is addressed to a student who continues talking after the lecture has commenced: oh! the rascal!


 * "Graduatus sum! nego"

applies to one who declined to subscribe for an M.A. degree.


 * "Usage mounts guard"

symbolizes a person of very fixed habits.


 * "Gus! Gus! a mature don!
 * August man! sure, god!
 * And Gus must argue, O!
 * Snug as mud to argue,
 * Must argue on gauds.
 * A mad rogue stung us.
 * Gag a numerous stud
 * Go! turn us! damage us!
 * Tug us! O drag us! Amen.
 * Grudge us! moan at us!
 * Daunt us! gag us more!
 * Dog-ear us, man! gut us!
 * D—— us! a rogue tugs!"
 * D—— us! a rogue tugs!"

are addressed to me by the circle-squarers; and,


 * "O! Gus! tug a mean surd!"

is smart upon my preference of an incommensurable value of $$\pi$$ to $$\scriptstyle 3\frac{1}{5}$$, or some such simple substitute. While,


 * "Gus! Gus! at 'em a' round!"

ought to be the backing of the scientific world to the author of the Budget of Paradoxes.

The whole collection commenced existence in the head of a powerful mathematician during some sleepless nights. Seeing how large a number was practicable, he amused himself by inventing a digested plan of finding more.

Is there any one whose name cannot be twisted into either praise or satire? I have had given to me,


 * "Thomas Babington Macaulay
 * Mouths big: a Cantab anomaly."

NEWTON'S DE MUNDI SYSTEMATE LIBER.

 * A treatise of the system of the world. By Sir Isaac Newton. Translated into English. London, 1728, 8vo.

I think I have a right to one little paradox of my own: I greatly doubt that Newton wrote this book. Castiglione, in his Newtoni Opuscula, gives it in the Latin which appeared in 1731, not for the first time; he says Angli omnes Newtono tribuunt. It appeared just after Newton's death, without the name of any editor, or any allusion to Newton's recent departure, purporting to be that popular treatise which Newton, at the beginning of the third book of the Principia, says he wrote, intending it to be the third book. It is very possible that some observant turnpenny might construct such a treatise as this from the third book, that it might be ready for publication the moment Newton could not disown it. It has been treated with singular silence: the name of the editor has never been given. Rigaud mentions it without a word: I cannot find it in Brewster's Newton, nor in the Biographia Britannica. There is no copy in the Catalogue of the Royal Society's Library, either in English or Latin, except in Castiglione. I am open to correction; but I think nothing from Newton's acknowledged works will prove—as laid down in the suspected work—that he took Numa's temple of Vesta, with a central fire, to be intended to symbolize the sun as the center of our system, in the Copernican sense.

Mr. Edleston gives an account of the lectures "de motu corporum," and gives the corresponding pages of the Latin "De Systemate Mundi" of 1731. But no one mentions the English of 1728. This English seems to agree with the Latin; but there is a mystery about it. The preface says, "That this work as here published is genuine will so clearly appear by the intrinsic marks it bears, that it will be but losing words and the reader's time to take pains in giving him any other satisfaction." Surely fewer words would have been lost if the prefator had said at once that the work was from the manuscript preserved at Cambridge. Perhaps it was a mangled copy clandestinely taken and interpreted.

A BACONIAN CONTROVERSY.

 * Lord Bacon not the author of "The Christian Paradoxes," being a reprint of "Memorials of Godliness and Christianity," by Herbert Palmer, B.D. With Introduction, Memoir, and Notes, by the Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, Kenross. (Private circulation, 1864).

I insert the above in this place on account of a slight connection with the last. Bacon's Paradoxes,—so attributed—were first published as his in some asserted "Remains," 1648. They were admitted into his works in 1730, and remain there to this day. The title is "The Character of a believing Christian, set forth in paradoxes and seeming contradictions." The following is a specimen:

"He believes three to be one and one to be three; a father not to be older than his son; a son to be equal with his father; and one proceeding from both to be equal with both: he believes three persons in one nature, and two natures in one person.... He believes the God of all grace to have been angry with one that never offended Him; and that God that hates sin to be reconciled to himself though sinning continually, and never making or being able to make Him any satisfaction. He believes a most just God to have punished a most just person, and to have justified himself, though a most ungodly sinner. He believes himself freely pardoned, and yet a sufficient satisfaction was made for him."

Who can doubt that if Bacon had written this it must have been wrong? Many writers, especially on the Continent, have taken him as sneering at (Athanasian) Christianity right and left. Many Englishmen have taken him to be quite in earnest, and to have produced a body of edifying doctrine. More than a century ago the Paradoxes were published as a penny tract; and, again, at the same price, in the Penny Sunday Reader, vol. vi, No. 148, a few passages were omitted, as too strong. But all did not agree: in my copy of Peter Shaw's edition (vol. ii, p. 283) the Paradoxes have been cut out by the binder, who has left the backs of the leaves. I never had the curiosity to see whether other copies of the edition have been served in the same way. The Religious Tract Society republished them recently in Selections from the Writings of Lord Bacon, (no date; bad plan; about 1863, I suppose). No omissions were made, so far as I find.

I never believed that Bacon wrote this paper; it has neither his sparkle nor his idiom. I stated my doubts even before I heard that Mr. Spedding, one of Bacon's editors, was of the same mind. (Athenæum, July 16, 1864). I was little moved by the wide consent of orthodox men: for I knew how Bacon, Milton, Newton, Locke, etc., were always claimed as orthodox until almost the present day. Of this there is a remarkable instance.

LOCKE AND SOCINIANISM.
Among the books which in my younger day were in some orthodox publication lists—I think in the list of the Christian Knowledge Society, but I am not sure—was Locke's "Reasonableness of Christianity." It seems to have come down from the eighteenth century, when the battle was belief in Christ against unbelief, simpliciter, as the logicians say. Now, if ever there was a Socinian book in the world, it is this work of Locke. "These two," says Locke, "faith and repentance, i.e., believing Jesus to be the Messiah, and a good life, are the indispensable conditions of the new covenant, to be performed by all those who would obtain eternal life." All the book is amplification of this doctrine. Locke, in this and many other things, followed Hobbes, whose doctrine, in the Leviathan, is fidem, quanta ad salutem necessaria est, contineri in hoc articulo, Jesus est Christus. For this Hobbes was called an atheist, which many still believe him to have been: some of his contemporaries called him, rightly, a Socinian. Locke was known for a Socinian as soon as his work appeared: Dr. John Edwards, his assailant, says he is "Socinianized all over." Locke, in his reply, says "there is not one word of Socinianism in it:" and he was right: the positive Socinian doctrine has not one word of Socinianism in it; Socinianism consists in omissions. Locke and Hobbes did not dare deny the Trinity: for such a thing Hobbes might have been roasted, and Locke might have been strangled. Accordingly, the well-known way of teaching Unitarian doctrine was the collection of the asserted essentials of Christianity, without naming the Trinity, etc. This is the plan Newton followed, in the papers which have at last been published.

So I, for one, thought little about the general tendency of orthodox writers to claim Bacon by means of the Paradoxes. I knew that, in his "Confession of Faith" he is a Trinitarian of a heterodox stamp. His second Person takes human nature before he took flesh, not for redemption, but as a condition precedent of creation. "God is so holy, pure, and jealous, that it is impossible for him to be pleased in any creature, though the work of his own hands.... [Gen. i. 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31, freely rendered]. But—purposing to become a Creator, and to communicate to his creatures, he ordained in his eternal counsel that one person of the Godhead should be united to one nature, and to one particular of his creatures; that so, in the person of the Mediator, the true ladder might be fixed, whereby God might descend to his creatures and his creatures might ascend to God...."

This is republished by the Religious Tract Society, and seems to suit their theology, for they confess to having omitted some things of which they disapprove.

In 1864, Mr. Grosart published his discovery that the Paradoxes are by Herbert Palmer; that they were first published surreptitiously, and immediately afterwards by himself, both in 1645; that the "Remains" of Bacon did not appear until 1648; that from 1645 to 1708, thirteen editions of the "Memorials" were published, all containing the Paradoxes. In spite of this, the Paradoxes were introduced into Bacon's works in 1730, where they have remained.

Herbert Palmer was of good descent, and educated as a Puritan. He was an accomplished man, one of the few of his day who could speak French as well as English. He went into the Church, and was beneficed by Laud, in spite of his puritanism; he sat in the Assembly of Divines, and was finally President of Queens' College, Cambridge, in which post he died, August 13, 1647, in the 46th year of his age.

Mr. Grosart says, speaking of Bacon's "Remains," "All who have had occasion to examine our early literature are aware that it was a common trick to issue imperfect, false, and unauthorized writings under any recently deceased name that might be expected to take. The Puritans, down to John Bunyan, were perpetually expostulating and protesting against such procedure." I have met with instances of all this; but I did not know that there was so much of it: a good collection would be very useful. The work of 1728, attributed to Newton, is likely enough to be one of the class.


 * Demonstration de l'immobilitez de la Terre.... Par M. de la Jonchere, Ingénieur Français. Londres, 1728, 8vo.

A synopsis which is of a line of argument belonging to the beginning of the preceding century.

TWO FORGOTTEN CIRCLE SQUARERS.

 * The Circle squared; together with the Ellipsis and several reflections on it. The finding two geometrical mean proportionals, or doubling the cube geometrically. By Richard Locke.... London, no date, probably about 1730, 8vo.

According to Mr. Locke, the circumference is three diameters, three-fourths the difference of the diameter and the side of the inscribed equilateral triangle, and three-fourths the difference between seven-eighths of the diameter and the side of the same triangle. This gives, he says, 3.18897. There is an addition to this tract, being an appendix to a book on the longitude.


 * The Circle squar'd. By Thos. Baxter, Crathorn, Cleaveland, Yorkshire. London, 1732, 8vo.

Here $$\pi$$ = 3.0625. No proof is offered.


 * The longitude discovered by the Eclipses, Occultations, and Conjunctions of Jupiter's planets. By William Whiston. London, 1738.

This tract has, in some copies, the celebrated preface containing the account of Newton's appearance before the Parliamentary Committee on the longitude question, in 1714 (Brewster, ii. 257-266). This "historical preface," is an insertion and is dated April 28, 1741, with four additional pages dated August 10, 1741. The short "preface" is by the publisher, John Whiston, the author's son.

THE STEAMSHIP SUGGESTED.

 * A description and draught of a new-invented machine for carrying vessels or ships out of, or into any harbour, port, or river, against wind and tide, or in a calm. For which, His Majesty has granted letters patent, for the sole benefit of the author, for the space of fourteen years. By Jonathan Hulls. London: printed for the author, 1737. Price sixpence (folding plate and pp. 48, beginning from title).

(I ought to have entered this tract in its place. It is so rare that its existence was once doubted. It is the earliest description of steam-power applied to navigation. The plate shows a barge, with smoking funnel, and paddles at the stem, towing a ship of war. The engine, as described, is Newcomen's.

In 1855, John Sheepshanks, so well known as a friend of Art and a public donor, reprinted this tract, in fac-simile, from his own copy; twenty-seven copies of the original 12mo size, and twelve on old paper, small 4to. I have an original copy, wanting the plate, and with "Price sixpence" carefully erased, to the honor of the book.

It is not known whether Hulls actually constructed a boat. In all probability his tract suggested to Symington, as Symington did to Fulton.)

THE NEWTONIANS ATTACKED.

 * Le vrai système de physique générale de M. Isaac Newton exposé et analysé en parallèle avec celui de Descartes. By Louis Castel [Jesuit and F.R.S.] Paris, 1743, 4to.

This is an elaborate correction of Newton's followers, and of Newton himself, who it seems did not give his own views with perfect fidelity. Father Castel, for instance, assures us that Newton placed the sun at rest in the center of the system. Newton left the sun to arrange that matter with the planets and the rest of the universe. In this volume of 500 pages there is right and wrong, both clever.


 * A dissertation on the Æther of Sir Isaac Newton. By Bryan Robinson, M.D. Dublin, 1743, 8vo.

A mathematical work professing to prove that the assumed ether causes gravitation.

MATHEMATICAL THEOLOGY.

 * Mathematical principles of theology, or the existence of God geometrically demonstrated. By Richard Jack, teacher of Mathematics. London, 1747, 8vo.

Propositions arranged after the manner of Euclid, with beings represented by circles and squares. But these circles and squares are logical symbols, not geometrical ones. I brought this book forward to the Royal Commission on the British Museum as an instance of the absurdity of attempting a classed catalogue from the titles of books. The title of this book sends it either to theology or geometry: when, in fact, it is a logical vagary. Some of the houses which Jack built were destroyed by the fortune of war in 1745, at Edinburgh: who will say the rebels did no good whatever? I suspect that Jack copied the ideas of J.B. Morinus, "Quod Deus sit," Paris, 1636, 4to, containing an attempt of the same kind, but not stultified with diagrams.

TWO MODEL INDORSEMENTS.

 * Dissertation, découverte, et démonstrations de la quadrature mathématique du cercle. Par M. de Fauré, géomètre. [s. l., probably Geneva] 1747, 8vo.


 * Analyse de la Quadrature du Cercle. Par M. de Fauré, Gentilhomme Suisse. Hague, 1749, 4to.

According to this octavo geometer and quarto gentleman, a diameter of 81 gives a circumference of 256. There is an amusing circumstance about the quarto which has been overlooked, if indeed the book has ever been examined. John Bernoulli (the one of the day) and Koenig have both given an attestation: my mathematical readers may stare as they please, such is the fact. But, on examination, there will be reason to think the two sly Swiss played their countryman the same trick as the medical man played Miss Pickle, in the novel of that name. The lady only wanted to get his authority against sousing her little nephew, and said, "Pray, doctor, is it not both dangerous and cruel to be the means of letting a poor tender infant perish by sousing it in water as cold as ice?"—"Downright murder, I affirm," said the doctor; and certified accordingly. De Fauré had built a tremendous scaffolding of equations, quite out of place, and feeling cock-sure that his solutions, if correct, would square the circle, applied to Bernoulli and Koenig—who after his tract of two years before, must have known what he was at—for their approbation of the solutions. And he got it, as follows, well guarded:


 * "Suivant les suppositions posées dans ce Mémoire, il est si évident que $$t$$ doit être = 34, $$y$$ = 1, et $$z$$ = 1, que cela n'a besoin ni de preuve ni d'autorité pour être reconnu par tout le monde.


 * "à Basle le 7e Mai 1749. "


 * "Je souscris au jugement de Mr. Bernoulli, en conséquence de ces suppositions.


 * "à la Haye le 21 Juin 1749. "

On which de Fauré remarks with triumph—as I have no doubt it was intended he should do—"il conste clairement par ma présente Analyse et Démonstration, qu'ils y ont déja reconnu et approuvé parfaitement que la quadrature du cercle est mathématiquement démontrée." It should seem that it is easier to square the circle than to get round a mathematician.


 * An attempt to demonstrate that all the Phenomena in Nature may be explained by two simple active principles, Attraction and Repulsion, wherein the attraction of Cohesion, Gravity and Magnetism are shown to be one the same. By Gowin Knight. London, 1748, 4to.

Dr. Knight was Mr. Panizzi's archetype, the first Principal Librarian of the British Museum. He was celebrated for his magnetical experiments. This work was long neglected; but is now recognized as of remarkable resemblance to modern speculations.