Budget of Paradoxes/L

ZETETIC ASTRONOMY.

 * Zetetic Astronomy: Earth not a globe. 1857 (Broadsheet).

Though only a traveling lecturer's advertisement, there are so many arguments and quotations that it is a little pamphlet. The lecturer gained great praise from provincial newspapers for his ingenuity in proving that the earth is a flat, surrounded by ice. Some of the journals rather incline to the view: but the Leicester Advertiser thinks that the statements "would seem very seriously to invalidate some of the most important conclusions of modern astronomy," while the Norfolk Herald is clear that "there must be a great error on one side or the other." This broadsheet is printed at Aylesbury in 1857, and the lecturer calls himself Parallax: but at Trowbridge, in 1849, he was S. Goulden. In this last advertisement is the following announcement: "A paper on the above subjects was read before the Council and Members of the Royal Astronomical Society, Somerset House, Strand, London (Sir John F. W. Herschel, President), Friday, Dec. 8, 1848." No account of such a paper appears in the Notice for that month: I suspect that the above is Mr. S. Goulden's way of representing the following occurrence: Dec. 8, 1848, the Secretary of the Astronomical Society (De Morgan by name) said, at the close of the proceedings,—"Now, gentlemen, if you will promise not to tell the Council, I will read something for your amusement": and he then read a few of the arguments which had been transmitted by the lecturer. The fact is worth noting that from 1849 to 1857, arguments on the roundness or flatness of the earth did itinerate. I have no doubt they did much good: for very few persons have any distinct idea of the evidence for the rotundity of the earth. The Blackburn Standard and Preston Guardian (Dec. 12 and 16, 1849) unite in stating that the lecturer ran away from his second lecture at Burnley, having been rather too hard pressed at the end of his first lecture to explain why the large hull of a ship disappeared before the sails. The persons present and waiting for the second lecture assuaged their disappointment by concluding that the lecturer had slipped off the icy edge of his flat disk, and that he would not be seen again till he peeped up on the opposite side.

But, strange as it may appear, the opposer of the earth's roundness has more of a case—or less of a want of case—than the arithmetical squarer of the circle. The evidence that the earth is round is but cumulative and circumstantial: scores of phenomena ask, separately and independently, what other explanation can be imagined except the sphericity of the earth. The evidence for the earth's figure is tremendously powerful of its kind; but the proof that the circumference is 3.14159265... times the diameter is of a higher kind, being absolute mathematical demonstration.

The Zetetic system still lives in lectures and books; as it ought to do, for there is no way of teaching a truth comparable to opposition. The last I heard of it was in lectures at Plymouth, in October, 1864. Since this time a prospectus has been issued of a work entitled "The Earth not a Globe"; but whether it has been published I do not know. The contents are as follows:

"The Earth a Plane—How circumnavigated.—How time is lost or gained.—Why a ship's hull disappears (when outward bound) before the mast head.—Why the Polar Star sets when we proceed Southward, etc.—Why a pendulum vibrates with less velocity at the Equator than at the Pole.—The allowance for rotundity supposed to be made by surveyors, not made in practice.—Measurement of Arcs of the Meridian unsatisfactory.—Degrees of Longitude North and South of the Equator considered.—Eclipses and Earth's form considered.—The Earth no motion on axis or in orbit.—How the Sun moves above the Earth's surface concentric with the North Pole.—Cause of Day and Night, Winter and Summer; the long alternation of light and darkness at the Pole.—Cause of the Sun rising and setting.—Distance of the Sun from London, 4,028 miles—How measured.—Challenge to Mathematicians.—Cause of Tides.—Moon self-luminous, NOT a reflector.—Cause of Solar and Lunar eclipses.—Stars not worlds; their distance.—Earth, the only material world; its true position in the universe; its condition and ultimate destruction by fire (2 Peter iii.), etc."

I wish there were geoplatylogical lectures in every town; in England (platylogical, in composition, need not mean babbling). The late Mr. Henry Archer would, if alive, be very much obliged to me for recording his vehement denial of the roundness of the earth: he was excited if he heard any one call it a globe. I cannot produce his proof from the Pyramids, and from some caves in Arabia. He had other curious notions, of course: I should no more believe that a flat earth was a man's only paradox, than I should that Dutens, the editor of Leibnitz, was eccentric only in supplying a tooth which he had lost by one which he found in an Italian tomb, and fully believed that it had once belonged to Scipio Africanus, whose family vault was discovered, it is supposed, in 1780. Mr. Archer is of note as the suggester of the perforated border of the postage-stamps, and, I think, of the way of doing it; for this he got 4000l. reward. He was a civil engineer.

(August 28, 1865.) The Zetetic Astronomy has come into my hands. When, in 1851, I went to see the Great Exhibition, I heard an organ played by a performer who seemed very desirous to exhibit one particular stop. "What do you think of that stop?" I was asked.—"That depends on the name of it," said I.—"Oh! what can the name have to do with the sound? 'that which we call a rose,' etc."—"The name has everything to do with it: if it be a flute-stop, I think it very harsh; but if it be a railway-whistle-stop, I think it very sweet." So as to this book: if it be childish, it is clever; if it be mannish, it is unusually foolish. The flat earth, floating tremulously on the sea; the sun moving always over the flat, giving day when near enough, and night when too far off; the self-luminous moon, with a semi-transparent invisible moon, created to give her an eclipse now and then; the new law of perspective, by which the vanishing of the hull before the masts, usually thought to prove the earth globular, really proves it flat;—all these and other things are well fitted to form exercises for a person who is learning the elements of astronomy. The manner in which the sun dips into the sea, especially in tropical climates, upsets the whole. Mungo Park, I think, gives an African hypothesis which explains phenomena better than this. The sun dips into the western ocean, and the people there cut him in pieces, fry him in a pan, and then join him together again, take him round the underway, and set him up in the east. I hope this book will be read, and that many will be puzzled by it: for there are many whose notions of astronomy deserve no better fate. There is no subject on which there is so little accurate conception as that of the motions of the heavenly bodies. The author, though confident in the extreme, neither impeaches the honesty of those whose opinions he assails, nor allots them any future inconvenience: in these points he is worthy to live on a globe, and to revolve in twenty-four hours.

(October, 1866.) A follower appears, in a work dedicated to the preceding author: it is Theoretical Astronomy examined and exposed by Common Sense. The author has 128 well-stuffed octavo pages. I hope he will not be the last. He prints the newspaper accounts of his work: the Church Times says—not seeing how the satire might be retorted—"We never began to despair of Scripture until we discovered that 'Common Sense' had taken up the cudgels in its defence." This paper considers our author as the type of a Protestant. The author himself, who gives a summary of his arguments in verse, has one couplet which is worth quoting:


 * "How is't that sailors, bound to sea, with a 'globe' would never start,
 * But in its place will always take Mercator's chart!"

To which I answer:


 * Why, really Mr. Common Sense, you've never got so far
 * As to think Mercator's planisphere shows countries as they are;
 * It won't do to measure distances; it points out how to steer,
 * But this distortion's not for you; another is, I fear.
 * The earth must be a cylinder, if seaman's charts be true,
 * Or else the boundaries, right and left, are one as well as two;
 * They contradict the notion that we dwell upon a plain,
 * For straight away, without a turn, will bring you home again.
 * There are various plane projections; and each one has its use:
 * I wish a milder word would rhyme—but really you're a goose!

The great wish of persons who expose themselves as above, is to be argued with, and to be treated as reputable and refutable opponents. "Common Sense" reminds us that no amount of "blatant ridicule" will turn right into wrong. He is perfectly correct: but then no amount of bad argument will turn wrong into right. These two things balance; and we are just where we were: but you should answer our arguments, for whom, I ask? Would reason convince this kind of reasoner? The issue is a short and a clear one. If these parties be what I contend they are, then ridicule is made for them: if not, for what or for whom? If they be right, they are only passing through the appointed trial of all good things. Appeal is made to the future: and my Budget is intended to show samples of the long line of heroes who have fallen without victory, each of whom had his day of confidence and his prophecy of success. Let the future decide: they say roundly that the earth is flat; I say flatly that it is round.

The paradoxers all want reason, and not ridicule: they are all accessible, and would yield to conviction. Well then, let them reason with one another! They divide into squads, each with a subject, and as many different opinions as persons in each squad. If they be really what they say they are, the true man of each set can put down all the rest, and can come crowned with glory and girdled with scalps, to the attack on the orthodox misbelievers. But they know, to a man, that the rest are not fit to be reasoned with: they pay the regulars the compliment of believing that the only chance lies with them. They think in their hearts, each one for himself, that ridicule is of fit appliance to the rest.


 * Miranda. A book divided into three parts, entitled Souls, Numbers, Stars, on the Neo-Christian Religion ... Vol. i. London, 1858, 1859, 1860. 8vo.

The name of the author is Filopanti. He announces himself as the 49th and last Emanuel: his immediate predecessors were Emanuel Washington, Emanuel Newton, and Emanuel Galileo. He is to collect nations into one family. He knows the transmigrations of the whole human race. Thus Descartes became William III of England: Roger Bacon became Boccaccio. But Charles IX, in retribution for the massacre of St. Bartholomew, was hanged in London under the name of Barthélemy for the murder of Collard: and many of the Protestants whom he killed as King of France were shouting at his death before the Old Bailey.

THE SABBATH—THE GREAT PYRAMID

 * A Letter to the members of the Anglo-Biblical Institute, dated Sept. 7, 1858, and signed 'Herman Heinfetter.' (Broadsheet.)

This gentleman is well known to the readers of the Athenæum, in which, for nearly twenty years, he has inserted, as advertisements, long arguments in favor of Christians keeping the Jewish Sabbath, beginning on Friday Evening. The present letter maintains that, by the force of the definite article, the days of creation may not be consecutive, but may have any time—millions of years—between them. This ingenious way of reconciling the author of Genesis and the indications of geology is worthy to be added to the list, already pretty numerous. Mr. Heinfetter has taken such pains to make himself a public agitator, that I do not feel it to be any invasion of private life if I state that I have heard he is a large corn-dealer. No doubt he is a member of the congregation whose almanac has already been described.


 * The great Pyramid. Why was it built? And who built it? By John Taylor, 1859, 12mo.

This work is very learned, and may be referred to for the history of previous speculations. It professes to connect the dimensions of the Pyramid with a system of metrology which is supposed to have left strong traces in the systems of modern times; showing the Egyptians to have had good approximate knowledge of the dimensions of the earth, and of the quadrature of the circle. These are points on which coincidence is hard to distinguish from intention. Sir John Herschel noticed this work, and gave several coincidences, in the Athenæum, Nos. 1696 and 1697, April 28 and May 5, 1860: and there are some remarks by Mr. Taylor in No. 1701, June 2, 1860.

Mr. Taylor's most recent publication is—


 * The battle of the Standards: the ancient, of four thousand years, against the modern, of the last fifty years—the less perfect of the two. London, 1864, 12mo.

This is intended as an appendix to the work on the Pyramid. Mr. Taylor distinctly attributes the original system to revelation, of which he says the Great Pyramid is the record. We are advancing, he remarks, towards the end of the Christian dispensation, and he adds that it is satisfactory to see that we retain the standards which were given by unwritten revelation 700 years before Moses. This is lighting the candle at both ends; for myself, I shall not undertake to deny or affirm either what is said about the dark past or what is hinted about the dark future.

My old friend Mr. Taylor is well known as the author of the argument which has convinced many, even most, that Sir Philip Francis was Junius: pamphlet, 1813; supplement, 1817; second edition "The Identity of Junius with a distinguished living character established," London, 1818, 8vo. He told me that Sir Philip Francis, in a short conversation with him, made only this remark, "You may depend upon it you are quite mistaken:" the phrase appears to me remarkable; it has an air of criticism on the book, free from all personal denial. He also mentioned that a hearer told him that Sir Philip said, speaking of writers on the question,—"Those fellows, for half-a-crown, would prove that Jesus Christ was Junius."

Mr. Taylor implies, I think, that he is the first who started the suggestion that Sir Philip Francis was Junius, which I have no means either of confirming or refuting. If it be so [and I now know that Mr. Taylor himself never heard of any predecessor], the circumstance is very remarkable: it is seldom indeed that the first proposer of any solution of a great and vexed question is the person who so nearly establishes his point in general opinion as Mr. Taylor has done.

As to the Junius question in general, there is a little bit of the philosophy of horse-racing which may be usefully applied. A man who is so confident of his horse that he places him far above any other, may nevertheless, and does, refuse to give odds against all in the field: for many small adverse chances united make a big chance for one or other of the opponents. I suspect Mr. Taylor has made it at least 20 to 1 for Francis against any one competitor who has been named: but what the odds may be against the whole field is more difficult to settle. What if the real Junius should be some person not yet named?

Mr. Jopling, Leisure Hour, May 23, 1863, relies on the porphyry coffer of the Great Pyramid, in which he finds "the most ancient and accurate standard of measure in existence."

I am shocked at being obliged to place a thoughtful and learned writer, and an old friend, before such a successor as he here meets with. But chronological arrangement defies all other arrangement.

(I had hoped that the preceding account would have met Mr. Taylor's eye in print: but he died during the last summer. For a man of a very thoughtful and quiet temperament, he had a curious turn for vexed questions. But he reflected very long and very patiently before he published: and all his works are valuable for their accurate learning, whichever side the reader may take.)

MRS. ELIZABETH COTTLE.
1859. The Cottle Church.—For more than twenty years printed papers have been sent about in the name of Elizabeth Cottle. It is not so remarkable that such papers should be concocted as that they should circulate for such a length of time without attracting public attention. Eighty years ago Mrs. Cottle might have rivalled Lieut. Brothers or Joanna Southcott. Long hence, when the now current volumes of our journals are well-ransacked works of reference, those who look into them will be glad to see this feature of our time: I therefore make a few extracts, faithfully copied as to type. The Italic is from the New Testament; the Roman is the requisite interpretation:

"Robert Cottle was numbered (5196) with the transgressors at the back of the Church in Norwood Cemetery, May 12, 1858—Isa. liii. 12. The Rev. J. G. Collinson, Minister of St. James's Church, Chapham, the then district church, before All Saints was built, read the funeral service over the Sepulchre wherein never before man was laid.

"Hewn on the stone, 'at the mouth of the Sepulchre,' is his name,—Robert Cottle, born at Bristol, June 2, 1774; died at Kirkstall Lodge, Clapham Park, May 6, 1858. And that day (May 12, 1858) was the preparation (day and year for 'the PREPARED place for you'—Cottleites—by the widowed mother of the Father's house, at Kirkstall Lodge—John xiv. 2, 3). And the Sabbath (Christmas Day, Dec. 25, 1859) drew on (for the resurrection of the Christian body on 'the third [Protestant Sun]-day'—1 Cor. xv. 35). Why seek ye the living (God of the New Jerusalem—Heb. xii. 22; Rev. iii. 12) among the dead (men): he (the God of Jesus) is not here (in the grave), but is risen (in the person of the Holy Ghost, from the supper of 'the dead in the second death' of Paganism). Remember how he spake unto you (in the church of the Rev. George Clayton, April 14, 1839). I will not drink henceforth (at this last Cottle supper) of the fruit of this (Trinity) vine, until that day (Christmas Day, 1859), when I (Elizabeth Cottle) drink it new with you (Cottleites) in my Father's kingdom—John xv. If this (Trinitarian) cup may not pass away from me (Elizabeth Cottle, April 14, 1839), except I drink it ('new with you Cottleites, in my Father's Kingdom'), thy will be done—Matt. xxvi. 29, 42, 64. 'Our Father which art (God) in Heaven,' hallowed be thy name, thy (Cottle) kingdom come, thy will be done in earth, as it is (done) in (the new) Heaven (and new earth of the new name of Cottle—Rev. xxi. 1; iii. 12).

"... Queen Elizabeth, from A.D. 1558 to 1566. And this WORD yet once more (by a second Elizabeth—the WORD of his oath) signifieth (at John Scott's baptism of the Holy Ghost) the removing of those things (those Gods and those doctrines) that are made (according to the Creeds and Commandments of men) that those things (in the moral law of God) which cannot be shaken (as a rule of faith and practice) may remain, wherefore we receiving (from Elizabeth) a kingdom (of God,) which cannot be moved (by Satan) let us have grace (in his Grace of Canterbury) whereby we may serve God acceptably (with the acceptable sacrifice of Elizabeth's body and blood of the communion of the Holy Ghost) with reverence (for truth) and godly fear (of the unpardonable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost) for our God (the Holy Ghost) is a consuming fire (to the nation that will not serve him in the Cottle Church). We cannot defend ourselves against the Almighty, and if He is our defence, no nation can invade us.

"In verse 4 the Church of St. Peter is in prison between four quaternions of soldiers—the Holy Alliance of 1815. Rev. vii. i. Elizabeth, the Angel of the Lord Jesus appears to the Jewish and Christian body with the vision of prophecy to the Rev. Geo. Clayton and his clerical brethren, April 8th, 1839. Rhoda was the name of her maid at Putney Terrace who used to open the door to her Peter, the Rev. Robert Ashton, the Pastor of 'the little flock' 'of 120 names together, assembled in an upper (school) room' at Putney Chapel, to which little flock she gave the revelation (Acts. i. 13, 15) of Jesus the same King of the Jews yesterday at the prayer meeting, Dec. 31, 1841, and to-day, Jan. 1, 1842, and for ever. See book of Life, page 24. Matt. xviii. 19, xxi. 13-16. In verse 6 the Italian body of St. Peter is sleeping 'in the second death' between the two Imperial soldiers of France and Austria. The Emperor of France from Jan. 1, to July 11, 1859, causes the Italian chains of St. Peter to fall off from his Imperial hands.

"I say unto thee, Robert Ashton, thou art Peter, a stone, and upon this rock, of truth, will I Elizabeth, the angel of Jesus, build my Cottle Church, and the gates of hell, the doors of St. Peter, at Rome, shall not prevail against it—Matt. xvi. 18. Rev. iii. 7-12."

This will be enough for the purpose. When any one who pleases can circulate new revelations of this kind, uninterrupted and unattended to, new revelations will cease to be a good investment of excentricity. I take it for granted that the gentlemen whose names are mentioned have nothing to do with the circulars or their doctrines. Any lady who may happen to be intrusted with a revelation may nominate her own pastor, or any other clergyman, one of her apostles; and it is difficult to say to what court the nominees can appeal to get the commission abrogated.

March 16, 1865. During the last two years the circulars have continued. It is hinted that funds are low: and two gentlemen who are represented as gone "to Bethlehem asylum in despair" say that Mrs. Cottle "will spend all that she hath, while Her Majesty's Ministers are flourishing on the wages of sin." The following is perhaps one of the most remarkable passages in the whole:

"Extol and magnify Him (Jehovah, the Everlasting God, see the Magnificat and Luke i. 45, 46—68—73—79), that rideth (by rail and steam over land and sea, from his holy habitation at Kirkstall Lodge, Psa. lxxvii. 19, 20), upon the (Cottle) heavens, as it were (Sept. 9, 1864, see pages 21, 170), upon an (exercising, Psa. cxxxi. 1), horse-(chair, bought of Mr. John Ward, Leicester-square)."

I have pretty good evidence that there is a clergyman who thinks Mrs. Cottle a very sensible woman.

[The Cottle Church. Had I chanced to light upon it at the time of writing, I should certainly have given the following. A printed letter to the Western Times, by Mr. Robert Cottle, was accompanied by a manuscript letter from Mrs. Cottle, apparently a circular. The date was Nov$r$. 1853, and the subject was the procedure against Mr. Maurice at King's College for doubting that God would punish human sins by an existence of torture lasting through years numbered by millions of millions of millions of millions (repeat the word millions without end,) etc. The memory of Mr. Cottle has, I think, a right to the quotation: he seems to have been no participator in the notions of his wife:

"The clergy of the Established Church, taken at the round number of 20,000, may, in their first estate, be likened to 20,000 gold blanks, destined to become sovereigns, in succession,—they are placed between the matrix of the Mint, when, by the pressure of the screw, they receive the impress that fits them to become part of the current coin of the realm. In a way somewhat analogous this great body of the clergy have each passed through the crucibles of Oxford and Cambridge,—have been assayed by the Bishop's chaplain, touching the health of their souls, and the validity of their call by the Divine Spirit, and then the gentle pressure of a prelate's hand upon their heads; and the words—'Receive the Holy Ghost,' have, in a brief space of time, wrought a change in them, much akin to the miracle of transubstantiation—the priests are completed, and they become the current ecclesiastical coin of our country. The whole body of clergy, here spoken of, have undergone the preliminary induction of baptism and confirmation; and all have been duly ordained, professing to hold one faith, and to believe in the selfsame doctrines! In short, to be as identical as the 20,000 sovereigns, if compared one with the other. But mind is not malleable and ductile, like gold; and all the preparations of tests, creeds, and catechisms will not insure uniformity of belief. No stamp of orthodoxy will produce the same impress on the minds of different men. Variety is manifest, and patent, upon everything mental and material. The Almighty has not created, nor man fashioned, two things alike! How futile, then, is the attempt to shape and mould man's apprehension of divine truth by one fallible standard of man's invention! If proof of this be required, an appeal might be made to history and the experience of eighteen hundred years."

This is an argument of force against the reasonableness of expecting tens of thousands of educated readers of the New Testament to find the doctrine above described in it. The lady's argument against the doctrine itself is very striking. Speaking of an outcry on this matter among the Dissenters against one of their body, who was the son of "the White Stone (Rev. ii. 17), or the Roman cement-maker," she says—

"If the doctrine for which they so wickedly fight were true, what would become of the black gentlemen for whose redemption I have been sacrificed from April 8 1839."

There are certainly very curious points about this revelation. There have been many surmises about the final restoration of the infernal spirits, from the earliest ages of Christianity until our own day: a collection of them would be worth making. On reading this in proof, I see a possibility that by "black gentlemen" may be meant the clergy: I suppose my first interpretation must have been suggested by context: I leave the point to the reader's sagacity.]

JAMES SMITH, ARCH-PARADOXER.

 * The Problem of squaring the circle solved; or, the circumference and area of the circle discovered. By James Smith. London, 1859, 8vo.


 * On the relations of a square inscribed in a circle. Read at the British Association, Sept. 1859, published in the Liverpool Courier, Oct. 8, 1859, and reprinted in broadsheet.


 * The question: Are there any commensurable relations between a circle and other Geometrical figures? Answered by a member of the British Association ... London, 1860, 8vo.—[This has been translated into French by M. Armand Grange, Bordeaux, 1863, 8vo.]


 * The Quadrature of the Circle. Correspondence between an eminent mathematician and James Smith, Esq. (Member of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board), London, 1861, 8vo. (pp. 200).


 * Letter to the ... British Association ... by James Smith, Esq. Liverpool, 1861, 8vo.


 * Letter to the ... British Association ... by James Smith, Esq. Liverpool, 1862, 8vo.—[These letters the author promised to continue.]


 * A Nut to crack for the readers of Professor De Morgan's 'Budget of Paradoxes.' By James Smith, Esq. Liverpool, 1863, 8vo.


 * Paper read at the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society, reported in the Liverpool Daily Courier, Jan. 26, 1864. Reprinted as a pamphlet.


 * The Quadrature of the circle, or the true ratio between the diameter and circumference geometrically and mathematically demonstrated. By James Smith, Esq. Liverpool, 1865, 8vo.




 * [On the relations between the dimensions and distances of the Sun, Moon, and Earth; a paper read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, Jan. 25, 1864. By James Smith, Esq.


 * The British Association in Jeopardy, and Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, in the stocks without hope of escape. Printed for the authors (J. S. confessed, and also hidden under Nauticus). (No date, 1865).


 * The British Association in Jeopardy, and Professor De Morgan in the Pillory without hope of escape. London, 1866, 8vo.]

When my work appeared in numbers, I had not anything like an adequate idea of Mr. James Smith's superiority to the rest of the world in the points in which he is superior. He is beyond a doubt the ablest head at unreasoning, and the greatest hand at writing it, of all who have tried in our day to attach their names to an error. Common cyclometers sink into puny orthodoxy by his side.

The behavior of this singular character induces me to pay him the compliment which Achilles paid Hector, to drag him round the walls again and again. He was treated with unusual notice and in the most gentle manner. The unnamed mathematician, E. M. bestowed a volume of mild correspondence upon him; Rowan Hamilton quietly proved him wrong in a way accessible to an ordinary schoolboy; Whewell, as we shall see, gave him the means of seeing himself wrong, even more easily than by Hamilton's method. Nothing would do; it was small kick and silly fling at all; and he exposed his conceit by alleging that he, James Smith, had placed Whewell in the stocks. He will therefore be universally pronounced a proper object of the severest literary punishment: but the opinion of all who can put two propositions together will be that of the many strokes I have given, the hardest and most telling are my republications of his own attempts to reason.

He will come out of my hands in the position he ought to hold, the Supreme Pontiff of cyclometers, the vicegerent of St. Vitus upon earth, the Mamamouchi of burlesque on inference. I begin with a review of him which appeared in the Athenæum of May 11, 1861. Mr. Smith says I wrote it: this I neither affirm nor deny; to do either would be a sin against the editorial system elsewhere described. Many persons tell me they know me by my style; let them form a guess: I can only say that many have declared as above while fastening on me something which I had never seen nor heard of.


 * The Quadrature of the Circle: Correspondence between an Eminent Mathematician and James Smith, Esq. (Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd; London, Simpkin, Marshall & Co.)

"A few weeks ago we were in perpetual motion. We did not then suppose that anything would tempt us on a circle-squaring expedition: but the circumstances of the book above named have a peculiarity which induces us to give it a few words.

"Mr. James Smith, a gentleman residing near Liverpool, was some years ago seized with the morbus cyclometricus. The symptoms soon took a defined form: his circumference shrank into exactly 3$1$/$8$ times his diameter, instead of close to 3$16$/$113$, which the mathematician knows to be so near to truth that the error is hardly at the rate of a foot in 2,000 miles. This shrinking of the circumference remained until it became absolutely necessary that it should be examined by the British Association. This body, which as Mr. James Smith found to his sorrow, has some interest in 'jealously guarding the mysteries of their profession,' refused at first to entertain the question. On this Mr. Smith changed his 'tactics' and the name of his paper, and smuggled in the subject under the form of 'The Relations of a Circle inscribed in a Square'! The paper was thus forced upon the Association, for Mr. Smith informs us that he 'gave the Section to understand that he was not the man that would permit even the British Association to trifle with him.' In other words, the Association bore with and were bored with the paper, as the shortest way out of the matter. Mr. Smith also circulated a pamphlet. Some kind-hearted man, who did not know the disorder as well as we do, and who appears in Mr. Smith's handsome octavo as E. M.—the initials of 'eminent mathematician'—wrote to him and offered to show him in a page that he was all wrong. Mr. Smith thereupon opened a correspondence, which is the bulk of the volume. When the correspondence was far advanced, Mr. Smith announced his intention to publish. His benevolent instructor—we mean in intention—protested against the publication, saying 'I do not wish to be gibbeted to the world as having been foolish enough to enter upon what I feel now to have been a ridiculous enterprise.'

"For this Mr. Smith cared nothing: he persisted in the publication, and the book is before us. Mr. Smith has had so much grace as to conceal his kind adviser's name under E. M., that is to say, he has divided the wrong among all who may be suspected of having attempted so hopeless a task as that of putting a little sense into his head. He has violated the decencies of private life. Against the will of the kind-hearted man who undertook his case, he has published letters which were intended for no other purpose than to clear his poor head of a hopeless delusion. He deserves the severest castigation; and he will get it: his abuse of confidence will stick by him all his days. Not that he has done his benefactor—in intention, again—any harm. The patience with which E. M. put the blunders into intelligible form, and the perseverance with which he tried to find a cranny-hole for common reasoning to get in at, are more than respectable: they are admirable. It is, we can assure E. M., a good thing that the nature of the circle-squarer should be so completely exposed as in this volume. The benefit which he intended Mr. James Smith may be conferred upon others. And we should very much like to know his name, and if agreeable to him, to publish it. As to Mr. James Smith, we can only say this: he is not mad. Madmen reason rightly upon wrong premises: Mr. Smith reasons wrongly upon no premises at all.

"E. M. very soon found out that, to all appearance, Mr. Smith got a circle of 3$1$/$8$ times the diameter by making it the supposition to set out with that there was such a circle; and then finding certain consequences which, so it happened, were not inconsistent with the supposition on which they were made. Error is sometimes self-consistent. However, E. M., to be quite sure of his ground, wrote a short letter, stating what he took to be Mr. Smith's hypothesis, containing the following: 'On AC as diameter, describe the circle D, which by hypothesis shall be equal to three and one-eighth times the length of AC.... I beg, before proceeding further, to ask whether I have rightly stated your argument.' To which Mr. Smith replied: 'You have stated my argument with perfect accuracy.' Still E. M. went on, and we could not help, after the above, taking these letters as the initials of Everlasting Mercy. At last, however, when Mr. Smith flatly denied that the area of the circle lies between those of the inscribed and circumscribed polygons, E. M. was fairly beaten, and gave up the task. Mr. Smith was left to write his preface, to talk about the certain victory of truth—which, oddly enough, is the consolation of all hopelessly mistaken men; to compare himself with Galileo; and to expose to the world the perverse behavior of the Astronomer Royal, on whom he wanted to fasten a conversation, and who replied, 'It would be a waste of time, Sir, to listen to anything you could have to say on such a subject.'

"Having thus disposed of Mr. James Smith, we proceed to a few remarks on the subject: it is one which a journal would never originate, but which is rendered necessary from time to time by the attempts of the autopseustic to become heteropseustic. To the mathematician we have nothing to say: the question is, what kind of assurance can be given to the world at large that the wicked mathematicians are not acting in concert to keep down their superior, Mr. James Smith, the current Galileo of the quadrature of the circle.

"Let us first observe that this question does not stand alone: independently of the millions of similar problems which exist in higher mathematics, the finding of the diagonal of a square has just the same difficulty, namely, the entrance of a pair of lines of which one cannot be definitely expressed by means of the other. We will show the reader who is up to the multiplication-table how he may go on, on, on, ever nearer, never there, in finding the diagonal of a square from the side.

"Write down the following rows of figures, and more, if you like, in the way described:


 * 1  2   5   12   29   70   169   408     985
 * 1  3   7   17   41   99   239   577   1393

After the second, each number is made up of double the last increased by the last but one: thus, 5 is 1 more than twice 2, 12 is 2 more than twice 5, 239 is 41 more than twice 99. Now, take out two adjacent numbers from the upper line, and the one below the first from the lower: as


 * 70  169
 * 99.

Multiply together 99 and 169, giving 16,731. If, then, you will say that 70 diagonals are exactly equal to 99 sides, you are in error about the diagonal, but an error the amount of which is not so great as the 16,731st part of the diagonal. Similarly, to say that five diagonals make exactly seven sides does not involve an error of the 84th part of the diagonal.

"Now, why has not the question of crossing the square been as celebrated as that of squaring the circle? Merely because Euclid demonstrated the impossibility of the first question, while that of the second was not demonstrated, completely, until the last century.

"The mathematicians have many methods, totally different from each other, of arriving at one and the same result, their celebrated approximation to the circumference of the circle. An intrepid calculator has, in our own time, carried his approximation to what they call 607 decimal places: this has been done by Mr. Shanks, of Houghton-le-Spring, and Dr. Rutherford has verified 441 of these places. But though 607 looks large, the general public will form but a hazy notion of the extent of accuracy acquired. We have seen, in Charles Knight's English Cyclopædia, an account of the matter which may illustrate the unimaginable, though rationally conceivable, extent of accuracy obtained.

"Say that the blood-globule of one of our animalcules is a millionth of an inch in diameter. Fashion in thought a globe like our own, but so much larger that our globe is but a blood-globule in one of its animalcules: never mind the microscope which shows the creature being rather a bulky instrument. Call this the first globe above us. Let the first globe above us be but a blood-globule, as to size, in the animalcule of a still larger globe, which call the second globe above us. Go on in this way to the twentieth globe above us. Now go down just as far on the other side. Let the blood-globule with which we started be a globe peopled with animals like ours, but rather smaller: and call this the first globe below us. Take a blood-globule out of this globe, people it, and call it the second globe below us: and so on to the twentieth globe below us. This is a fine stretch of progression both ways. Now give the giant of the twentieth globe above us the 607 decimal places, and, when he has measured the diameter of his globe with accuracy worthy of his size, let him calculate the circumference of his equator from the 607 places. Bring the little philosopher from the twentieth globe below us with his very best microscope, and set him to see the small error which the giant must make. He will not succeed, unless his microscopes be much better for his size than ours are for ours.

"Now it must be remembered by any one who would laugh at the closeness of the approximation, that the mathematician generally goes nearer; in fact his theorems have usually no error at all. The very person who is bewildered by the preceding description may easily forget that if there were no error at all, the Lilliputian of the millionth globe below us could not find a flaw in the Brobdingnagian of the millionth globe above. The three angles of a triangle, of perfect accuracy of form, are absolutely equal to two right angles; no stretch of progression will detect any error.

"Now think of Mr. Lacomme's mathematical adviser (ante, Vol. I, p. 46) making a difficulty of advising a stonemason about the quantity of pavement in a circular floor!

"We will now, for our non-calculating reader, put the matter in another way. We see that a circle-squarer can advance, with the utmost confidence, the assertion that when the diameter is 1,000, the circumference is accurately 3,125: the mathematician declaring that it is a trifle more than 3,141½. If the squarer be right, the mathematician has erred by about a 200th part of the whole: or has not kept his accounts right by about 10s. in every 100l. Of course, if he set out with such an error he will accumulate blunder upon blunder. Now, if there be a process in which close knowledge of the circle is requisite, it is in the prediction of the moon's place—say, as to the time of passing the meridian at Greenwich—on a given day. We cannot give the least idea of the complication of details: but common sense will tell us that if a mathematician cannot find his way round the circle without a relative error four times as big as a stockbroker's commission, he must needs be dreadfully out in his attempt to predict the time of passage of the moon. Now, what is the fact? His error is less than a second of time, and the moon takes 27 days odd to revolve. That is to say, setting out with 10s. in 100l. of error in his circumference, he gets within the fifth part of a farthing in 100l. in predicting the moon's transit. Now we cannot think that the respect in which mathematical science is held is great enough—though we find it not small—to make this go down. That respect is founded upon a notion that right ends are got by right means: it will hardly be credited that the truth can be got to farthings out of data which are wrong by shillings. Even the celebrated Hamilton of Edinburgh, who held that in mathematics there was no way of going wrong, was fully impressed with the belief that this was because error was avoided from the beginning. He never went so far as to say that a mathematician who begins wrong must end right somehow.

"There is always a difficulty about the mode in which the thinking man of common life is to deal with subjects he has not studied to a professional extent. He must form opinions on matters theological, political, legal, medical, and social. If he can make up his mind to choose a guide, there is, of course, no perplexity: but on all the subjects mentioned the direction-posts point different ways. Now why should he not form his opinion upon an abstract mathematical question? Why not conclude that, as to the circle, it is possible Mr. James Smith may be the man, just as Adam Smith was the man of things then to come, or Luther, or Galileo? It is true that there is an unanimity among mathematicians which prevails in no other class: but this makes the chance of their all being wrong only different in degree. And more than this, is it not generally thought among us that priests and physicians were never so much wrong as when there was most appearance of unanimity among them? To the preceding questions we see no answer except this, that the individual inquirer may as rationally decide a mathematical question for himself as a theological or a medical question, so soon as he can put himself into a position in mathematics, level with that in which he stands in theology or medicine. The every-day thought and reading of common life have a certain resemblance to the thought and reading demanded by the learned faculties. The research, the balance of evidence, the estimation of probabilities, which are used in a question of medicine, are closely akin in character, however different the matter of application, to those which serve a merchant to draw his conclusions about the markets. But the mathematicians have methods of their own, to which nothing in common life bears close analogy, as to the nature of the results or the character of the conclusions. The logic of mathematics is certainly that of common life: but the data are of a different species; they do not admit of doubt. An expert arithmetician, such as is Mr. J. Smith, may fancy that calculation, merely as such, is mathematics: but the value of his book, and in this point of view it is not small, is the full manner in which it shows that a practised arithmetician, venturing into the field of mathematical demonstration, may show himself utterly destitute of all that distinguishes the reasoning geometrical investigator from the calculator.

"And further, it should be remembered that in mathematics the power of verifying results far exceeds that which is found in anything else: and also the variety of distinct methods by which they can be attained. It follows from all this that a person who desires to be as near the truth as he can will not judge the results of mathematical demonstration to be open to his criticism, in the same degree as results of other kinds. Should he feel compelled to decide, there is no harm done: his circle may be 3⅛ times its diameter, if it please him. But we must warn him that, in order to get this circle, he must, as Mr. James Smith has done, make it at home: the laws of space and thought beg leave respectfully to decline the order."

I will insert now at length, from the Athenæum of June 8, 1861, the easy refutation given by my deceased friend, with the remarks which precede.

"Mr. James Smith, of whose performance in the way of squaring the circle we spoke some weeks ago in terms short of entire acquiescence, has advertised himself in our columns, as our readers will have seen. He has also forwarded his letter to the Liverpool Albion, with an additional statement, which he did not make in our journal. He denies that he has violated the decencies of private life, since his correspondent revised the proofs of his own letters, and his 'protest had respect only to making his name public.' This statement Mr. James Smith precedes by saying that we have treated as true what we well knew to be false: and he follows by saying that we have not read his work, or we should have known the above facts to be true. Mr. Smith's pretext is as follows. His correspondent E. M. says, 'My letters were not intended for publication, and I protest against their being published,' and he subjoins 'Therefore I must desire that my name may not be used.' The obvious meaning is that E. M. protested against the publication altogether, but, judging that Mr. Smith was determined to publish, desired that his name should not be used. That he afterwards corrected the proofs merely means that he thought it wiser to let them pass under his own eyes than to leave them entirely to Mr. Smith.

"We have received from Sir W. Rowan Hamilton a proof that the circumference is more than 3⅛ diameters, requiring nothing but a knowledge of four books of Euclid. We give it in brief as an exercise for our juvenile readers to fill up. It reminds us of the old days when real geometers used to think it worth while seriously to demolish pretenders. Mr. Smith's fame is now assured: Sir W. R. Hamilton's brief and easy exposure will procure him notice in connection with this celebrated problem.

"It is to be shown that the perimeter of a regular polygon of 20 sides is greater than 3⅛ diameters of the circle, and still more, of course, is the circumference of the circle greater than 3⅛ diameters.

"1. It follows from the 4th Book of Euclid, that the rectangle under the side of a regular decagon inscribed in a circle, and that side increased by the radius, is equal to the square of the radius. But the product 791 (791 + 1280) is less than 1280 × 1280; if then the radius be 1280 the side of the decagon is greater than 791.

"2. When a diameter bisects a chord, the square of the chord is equal to the rectangle under the doubles of the segments of the diameter. But the product 125 (4 × 1280 - 125) is less than 791 × 791. If then the bisected chord be a side of the decagon, and if the radius be still 1280, the double of the lesser segment exceeds 125.

"3. The rectangle under this doubled segment and the radius is equal to the square of the side of an inscribed regular polygon of 20 sides. But the product 125 × 1280 is equal to 400 × 400; therefore, the side of the last-mentioned polygon is greater than 400, if the radius be still 1280. In other words, if the radius be represented by the new member 16, and therefore the diameter by 32, this side is greater than 5, and the perimeter exceeds 100. So that, finally, if the diameter be 8, the perimeter of the inscribed regular polygon of 20 sides, and still more the circumference of the circle, is greater than 25: that is, the circumference is more than 3⅛ diameters."

The last work in the list was thus noticed in the Athenæum, May 27, 1865.

"Mr. James Smith appears to be tired of waiting for his place in the Budget of Paradoxes, and accordingly publishes a long letter to Professor De Morgan, with various prefaces and postscripts. The letter opens by a hint that the Budget appears at very long intervals, and 'apparently without any sufficient reason for it.' As Mr. Smith hints that he should like to see Mr. De Morgan, whom he calls an 'elephant of mathematics,' 'pumping his brains' 'behind the scenes'—an odd thing for an elephant to do, and an odd place to do it in—to get an answer, we think he may mean to hint that the Budget is delayed until the pump has worked successfully. Mr. Smith is informed that we have had the whole manuscript of the Budget, excepting only a final summing-up, in our hands since October, 1863. [This does not refer to the Supplement.] There has been no delay: we knew from the beginning that a series of historical articles would be frequently interrupted by the things of the day. Mr. James Smith lets out that he has never been able to get a private line from Mr. De Morgan in answer to his communications: we should have guessed it. He says, 'The Professor is an old bird and not to be easily caught, and by no efforts of mine have I been able, up to the present moment, either to induce or twit him into a discussion....' Mr. Smith curtails the proverb: old birds are not to be caught with chaff, nor with twit, which seems to be Mr. Smith's word for his own chaff, and, so long as the first letter is sounded, a very proper word. Why does he not try a little grain of sense? Mr. Smith evidently thinks that, in his character as an elephant, the Professor has not pumped up brain enough to furnish forth a bird. In serious earnest, Mr. Smith needs no answer. In one thing he excites our curiosity: what is meant by demonstrating 'geometrically and mathematically?'"

I now proceed to my original treatment of the case.

Mr. James Smith will, I have no doubt, be the most uneclipsed circle-squarer of our day. He will not owe this distinction to his being an influential and respected member of the commercial world of Liverpool, even though the power of publishing which his means give him should induce him to issue a whole library upon one paradox. Neither will he owe it to the pains taken with him by a mathematician who corresponded with him until the joint letters filled an octavo volume. Neither will he owe it to the notice taken of him by Sir William Hamilton, of Dublin, who refuted him in a manner intelligible to an ordinary student of Euclid, which refutation he calls a remarkable paradox easily explainable, but without explaining it. What he will owe it to I proceed to show.

Until the publication of the Nut to Crack Mr. James Smith stood among circle-squarers in general. I might have treated him with ridicule, as I have done others: and he says that he does not doubt he shall come in for his share at the tail end of my Budget. But I can make a better job of him than so, as Locke would have phrased it: he is such a very striking example of something I have said on the use of logic that I prefer to make an example of his writings. On one point indeed he well deserves the scutica, if not the horribile flagellum. He tells me that he will bring his solution to me in such a form as shall compel me to admit it as un fait accompli [une faute accomplie?] or leave myself open to the humiliating charge of mathematical ignorance and folly. He has also honored me with some private letters. In the first of these he gives me a "piece of information," after which he cannot imagine that I, "as an honest mathematician," can possibly have the slightest hesitation in admitting his solution. There is a tolerable reservoir of modest assurance in a man who writes to a perfect stranger with what he takes for an argument, and gives an oblique threat of imputation of dishonesty in case the argument be not admitted without hesitation; not to speak of the minor charges of ignorance and folly. All this is blind self-confidence, without mixture of malicious meaning; and I rather like it: it makes me understand how Sam Johnson came to say of his old friend Mrs. Cobb,—"I love Moll Cobb for her impudence." I have now done with my friend's suaviter in modo, and proceed to his fortiter in re: I shall show that he has convicted himself of ignorance and folly, with an honesty and candor worthy of a better value of π.

Mr. Smith's method of proving that every circle is 3⅛ diameters is to assume that it is so,—"if you dislike the term datum, then, by hypothesis, let 8 circumferences be exactly equal to 25 diameters,"—and then to show that every other supposition is thereby made absurd. The right to this assumption is enforced in the "Nut" by the following analogy:

"I think you (!) will not dare (!) to dispute my right to this hypothesis, when I can prove by means of it that every other value of π will lead to the grossest absurdities; unless indeed, you are prepared to dispute the right of Euclid to adopt a false line hypothetically for the purpose of a reductio ad absurdum demonstration, in pure geometry."

Euclid assumes what he wants to disprove, and shows that his assumption leads to absurdity, and so upsets itself. Mr. Smith assumes what he wants to prove, and shows that his assumption makes other propositions lead to absurdity. This is enough for all who can reason. Mr. James Smith cannot be argued with; he has the whip-hand of all the thinkers in the world. Montucla would have said of Mr. Smith what he said of the gentleman who squared his circle by giving 50 and 49 the same square root, Il a perdu le droit d'être frappé de l'évidence.

It is Mr. Smith's habit, when he finds a conclusion agreeing with its own assumption, to regard that agreement as proof of the assumption. The following is the "piece of information" which will settle me, if I be honest. Assuming π to be 3⅛, he finds out by working instance after instance that the mean proportional between one-fifth of the area and one-fifth of eight is the radius. That is,


 * if $$\pi = \frac{25}{8}$$, $$\sqrt{\Bigg.}\left(\frac{\pi r^2}{5}\cdot\frac{8}{5}\right) = r.$$

This "remarkable general principle" may fail to establish Mr. Smith's quadrature, even in an honest mind, if that mind should happen to know that, a and b being any two numbers whatever, we need only assume—


 * $$\pi = \frac{a^2}{b}$$, to get at $$\sqrt{\Bigg.}\left(\frac{\pi r^2}{a}\cdot\frac{b}{a}\right) = r.$$

We naturally ask what sort of glimmer can Mr. Smith have of the subject which he professes to treat? On this point he has given satisfactory information. I had mentioned the old problem of finding two mean proportionals, as a preliminary to the duplication of the cube. On this mention Mr. Smith writes as follows. I put a few words in capitals; and I write rq for the sign of the square root, which embarrasses small type:

"This establishes the following infallible rule, for finding two mean proportionals OF EQUAL VALUE, and is more than a preliminary, to the famous old problem of 'Squaring the circle.' Let any finite number, say 20, and its fourth part = ¼(20) = 5, be given numbers. Then rq(20 × 5) = rq 100 = 10, is their mean proportional. Let this be a given mean proportional TO FIND ANOTHER MEAN PROPORTIONAL OF EQUAL VALUE. Then


 * 20 × $$\tfrac{\pi}{4}$$ = 20 × $$\tfrac{3.125}{4}$$ = 20 × .78125 = 15.625

will be the first number; as


 * 25 : 16 :: rq 20 : rq 8.192: and (rq 8.192)$2$ × $$\tfrac{\pi}{4}$$ = 8.192 × .78125 = 6.4

will be the second number; therefore rq(15.625 × 6.4) = rq 100 = 10, is the required mean proportional.... Now, my good Sir, however competent you may be to prove every man a fool [not every man, Mr. Smith! only some; pray learn logical quantification] who now thinks, or in times gone by has thought, the 'Squaring of the Circle' a possibility; I doubt, and, on the evidence afforded by your Budget, I cannot help doubting, whether you were ever before competent to find two mean proportionals by my unique method."—(Nut, pp. 47, 48.) [That I never was, I solemnly declare!]

All readers can be made to see the following exposure. When 5 and 20 are given, x is a mean proportional when in 5, x, 20, 5 is to x as x to 20. And x must be 10. But x and y are two mean proportionals when in 5, x, y, 20, x is a mean proportional between 5 and y, and y is a mean proportional between x and 20. And these means are x = 5 ³&radic;4, y = 5 ³&radic;16. But Mr. Smith finds one mean, finds it again in a roundabout way, and produces 10 and 10 as the two (equal!) means, in solution of the "famous old problem." This is enough: if more were wanted, there is more where this came from. Let it not be forgotten that Mr. Smith has found a translator abroad, two, perhaps three, followers at home, and—most surprising of all—a real mathematician to try to set him right. And this mathematician did not discover the character of the subsoil of the land he was trying to cultivate until a goodly octavo volume of letters had passed and repassed. I have noticed, in more quarters than one, an apparent want of perception of the full amount of Mr. Smith's ignorance: persons who have not been in contact with the non-geometrical circle-squarers have a kind of doubt as to whether anybody can carry things so far. But I am an "old bird" as Mr. Smith himself calls me; a Simorg, an "all-knowing Bird of Ages" in matters of cyclometry.

The curious phenomena of thought here exhibited illustrate, as above said, a remark I have long ago made on the effect of proper study of logic. Most persons reason well enough on matter to which they are accustomed, and in terms with which they are familiar. But in unaccustomed matter, and with use of strange terms, few except those who are practised in the abstractions of pure logic can be tolerably sure to keep their feet. And one of the reasons is easily stated: terms which are not quite familiar partake of the vagueness of the X and Y on which the student of logic learns to see the formal force of a proposition independently of its material elements.

I make the following quotation from my fourth paper on logic in the Cambridge Transactions:

"The uncultivated reason proceeds by a process almost entirely material. Though the necessary law of thought must determine the conclusion of the ploughboy as much as that of Aristotle himself, the ploughboy's conclusion will only be tolerably sure when the matter of it is such as comes within his usual cognizance. He knows that geese being all birds does not make all birds geese, but mainly because there are ducks, chickens, partridges, etc. A beginner in geometry, when asked what follows from 'Every A is B,' answers 'Every B is A.' That is, the necessary laws of thought, except in minds which have examined their tools, are not very sure to work correct conclusions except upon familiar matter.... As the cultivation of the individual increases, the laws of thought which are of most usual application are applied to familiar matter with tolerable safety. But difficulty and risk of error make a new appearance with a new subject; and this, in most cases, until new subjects are familiar things, unusual matter common, untried nomenclature habitual; that is, until it is a habit to be occupied upon a novelty. It is observed that many persons reason well in some things and badly in others; and this is attributed to the consequence of employing the mind too much upon one or another subject. But those who know the truth of the preceding remarks will not have far to seek for what is often, perhaps most often, the true reason.... I maintain that logic tends to make the power of reason over the unusual and unfamiliar more nearly equal to the power over the usual and familiar than it would otherwise be. The second is increased; but the first is almost created."

Mr. James Smith, by bringing ignorance, folly, dishonesty into contact with my name, in the way of conditional insinuation, has done me a good turn: he has given me right to a freedom of personal remark which I might have declined to take in the case of a person who is useful and respected in matters which he understands.

Tit for tat is logic all the world over. By the way, what has become of the rest of the maxim: we never hear it now. When I was a boy, in some parts of the country at least, it ran thus:


 * "Tit for tat;
 * Butter for fat:
 * If you kill my dog,
 * I'll kill your cat."

He is a glaring instance of the truth of the observations quoted above. I will answer for it that, at the Mersey Dock Board, he never dreams of proving that the balance at the banker's is larger than that in the book by assuming that the larger sum is there, and then proving that the other supposition—the smaller balance—is upon that assumption, an absurdity. He never says to another director, How can you dare to refuse me a right to assume the larger balance, when you yourself, the other day, said,—Suppose, for argument's sake, we had 80,000l. at the banker's, though you knew the book only showed 30,000l.? This is the way in which he has supported his geometrical paradox by Euclid's example: and this is not the way he reasons at the board; I know it by the character of him as a man of business which has reached my ears from several quarters. But in geometry and rational arithmetic he is a smatterer, though expert at computation; at the board he is a trained man of business. The language of geometry is so new to him that he does not know what is meant by "two mean proportionals:" but all the phrases of commerce are rooted in his mind. He is most unerasably booked in the history of the squaring of the circle, as the speculator who took a right to assume a proposition for the destruction of other propositions, on the express ground that Euclid assumes a proposition to show that it destroys itself: which is as if the curate should demand permission to throttle the squire because St. Patrick drove the vermin to suicide to save themselves from slaughter. He is conspicuous as a speculator who, more visibly than almost any other known to history, reasoned in a circle by way of reasoning on a circle. But what I have chiefly to do with is the force of instance which he has lent to my assertion that men who have not had real training in pure logic are unsafe reasoners in matter which is not familiar. It is hard to get first-rate examples of this, because there are few who find the way to the printer until practice and reflection have given security against the grossest slips. I cannot but think that his case will lead many to take what I have said into consideration, among those who are competent to think of the great mental disciplines. To this end I should desire him to continue his efforts, to amplify and develop his great principle, that of proving a proposition by assuming it and taking as confirmation every consequence that does not contradict the assumption.

Since my Budget commenced, Mr. Smith has written me notes: the portion which I have preserved—I suppose several have been mislaid—makes a hundred and seven pages of note-paper, closely written. To all this I have not answered one word: but I think I cannot have read fewer than forty pages. In the last letter the writer informs me that he will not write at greater length until I have given him an answer, according to the "rules of good society." Did I not know that for every inch I wrote back he would return an ell? Surely in vain the net is spread in the eyes of anything that hath a wing. There were several good excuses for not writing to Mr. J. Smith: I will mention five. First, I distinctly announced at the beginning of this Budget that I would not communicate with squarers of the circle. Secondly, any answer I might choose to give might with perfect propriety be reserved for this article; had the imputation of incivility been made after the first note, I should immediately have replied to this effect: but I presumed it was quite understood. Thirdly, Mr. Smith, by his publication of E. M.'s letters against the wish of the writer, had put himself out of the pale of correspondence. Fourthly, he had also gone beyond the rules of good society in sending letter after letter to a person who had shown by his silence an intention to avoid correspondence. Fifthly, these same rules of good society are contrived to be flexible or frangible in extreme cases: otherwise there would be no living under them; and good society would be bad. Father Aldrovand has laid down the necessary distinction—"I tell thee, thou foolish Fleming, the text speaketh but of promises made unto Christians, and there is in the rubric a special exemption of such as are made to Welchmen." There is also a rubric to the rules of good society; and squarers of the circle are among those whom there is special permission not to answer: they are the wild Welchmen of geometry, who are always assailing, but never taking, the Garde Douloureuse of the circle. "At this commentary," proceeds the story, "the Fleming grinned so broadly as to show his whole case of broad strong white teeth." I know not whether the Welchman would have done the like, but I hope Mr. James Smith will: and I hope he has as good a case to show as Wilkin Flammock. For I wish him long life and long health, and should be very glad to see so much energy employed in a productive way. I hope he wishes me the same: if not, I will give him what all his judicious friends will think a good reason for doing so. His pamphlets and letters are all tied up together, and will form a curious lot when death or cessation of power to forage among book-shelves shall bring my little library to the hammer. And this time may not be far off: for I was X years old in A.D. X$2$; not 4 in A.D. 16, nor 5 in A.D. 25, but still in one case under that law. And now I have made my own age a problem of quadrature, and Mr. J. Smith may solve it. But I protest against his method of assuming a result, and making itself prove itself: he might in this way, as sure as eggs is eggs (a corruption of X is X), make me 1,864 years old, which is a great deal too much.

April 5, 1864.—Mr. Smith continues to write me long letters, to which he hints that I am to answer. In his last, of 31 closely written sides of note-paper, he informs me, with reference to my obstinate silence, that though I think myself and am thought by others to be a mathematical Goliath, I have resolved to play the mathematical snail, and keep within my shell. A mathematical snail! This cannot be the thing so called which regulates the striking of a clock; for it would mean that I am to make Mr. Smith sound the true time of day, which I would by no means undertake upon a clock that gains 19 seconds odd in every hour by false quadrature. But he ventures to tell me that pebbles from the sling of simple truth and common sense will ultimately crack my shell, and put me hors de combat. The confusion of images is amusing: Goliath turning himself into a snail to avoid π = 3⅛, and James Smith, Esq., of the Mersey Dock Board: and put hors de combat—which should have been caché—by pebbles from a sling. If Goliath had crept into a snail-shell, David would have cracked the Philistine with his foot. There is something like modesty in the implication that the crack-shell pebble has not yet taken effect; it might have been thought that the slinger would by this time have been singing—


 * "And thrice [and one-eighth] I routed all my foes,
 * And thrice [and one-eighth] I slew the slain."

But he promises to give the public his nut-cracker if I do not, before the Budget is concluded, "unravel" the paradox, which is the mathematico-geometrical nut he has given me to crack. Mr. Smith is a crack man: he will crack his own nut; he will crack my shell; in the mean time he cracks himself up. Heaven send he do not crack himself into lateral contiguity with himself.

On June 27 I received a letter, in the handwriting of Mr. James Smith, signed Nauticus. I have ascertained that one of the letters to the Athenæum signed Nauticus is in the same handwriting. I make a few extracts:

"... The important question at issue has been treated by a brace of mathematical birds with too much levity. It may be said, however, that sarcasm and ridicule sometimes succeed, where reason fails.... Such a course is not well suited to a discussion.... For this reason I shall for the future [this implies there has been a past, so that Nauticus is not before me for the first time] endeavor to confine myself to dry reasoning from incontrovertible premises.

... It appears to me that so far as his theory is concerned he comes off unscathed. You might have found "a hole in Smith's circle" (have you seen a pamphlet bearing this title? [I never heard of it until now]), but after all it is quite possible the hole may have been left by design, for the purpose of entrapping the unwary."

[On the publication of the above, the author of the pamphlet obligingly forwarded a copy to me of A Hole in Smith's Circle—by a Cantab: Longman and Co., 1859, (pp. 15). "It is pity to lose any fun we can get out of the affair," says my almamaternal brother: to which I add that in such a case warning without joke is worse than none at all, as giving a false idea of the nature of the danger. The Cantab takes some absurdities on which I have not dwelt: but there are enough to afford a Cantab from every college his own separate hunting ground.]

Does this hint that his mode of proof, namely, assuming the thing to be proved, was a design to entrap the unwary? if so, it bangs Banagher. Was his confounding two mean proportionals with one mean proportional found twice over a trick of the same intent? if so, it beats cockfighting. That Nauticus is Mr. Smith appears from other internal evidence. In 1819, Mr. J. C. Hobhouse was sent to Newgate for a libel on the House of Commons which was only intended for a libel on Lord Erskine. The ex-Chancellor had taken Mr. Hobhouse to be thinking of him in a certain sentence; this Mr. Hobhouse denied, adding, "There is but one man in the country who is always thinking of Lord Erskine." I say that there is but one man of our day who would couple me and Mr. James Smith as a "brace of mathematical birds."

Mr. Smith's "theory" is unscathed by me. Not a doubt about it: but how does he himself come off? I should never think of refuting a theory proved by assumption of itself. I left Mr. Smith's π untouched: or, if I put in my thumb and pulled out a plum, it was to give a notion of the cook, not of the dish. The "important question at issue" was not the circle: it was, wholly and solely, whether the abbreviation of James might be spelled Jimm. This is personal to the verge of scurrility: but in literary controversy the challenger names the weapons, and Mr. Smith begins with charge of ignorance, folly, and dishonesty, by conditional implication. So that the question is, not the personality of a word, but its applicability to the person designated: it is enough if, as the Latin grammar has it, Verbum personale concordat cum nominativo.

I may plead precedent for taking a liberty with the orthography of Jem. An instructor of youth was scandalized at the abrupt and irregular—but very effective—opening of Wordsworth's little piece:


 * "A simple child
 * That lightly draws its breath,
 * And feels its life in every limb,
 * What should it know of death?"

So he mended the matter by instructing his pupils to read the first line thus:


 * "A simple child, dear brother ——."

The brother, we infer from sound, was to be James, and the blank must therefore be filled up with Jimb.

I will notice one point of the letter, to make a little more distinction between the two birds. Nauticus lays down—quite correctly—that the sine of an angle is less than its circular measure. He then takes 3.1416 for 180°, and finds that 36' is .010472. But this is exactly what he finds for the sine of 36' in tables: he concludes that either 3.1416 or the tables must be wrong. He does not know that sines, as well as π, are interminable decimals, of which the tables, to save printing, only take in a finite number. He is a six-figure man: let us go thrice again to make up nine, and we have as follows:

Mr. Smith invites me to say which is wrong, the quadrature, or the tables: I leave him to guess. He says his assertions "arise naturally and necessarily out of the arguments of a circle-squarer:" he might just as well lay down that all the pigs went to market because it is recorded that "This pig went to market." I must say for circle-squarers that very few bring their pigs to so poor a market. I answer the above argument because it is, of all which Mr. James Smith has produced, the only one which rises to the level of a schoolboy: to meet him halfway I descend to that level.

Mr. Smith asks me to solve a problem in the Athenæum: and I will do it, because the question will illustrate what is below schoolboy level.

"Let x represent the circular measure of an angle of 15°, and y half the sine of an angle of 30° = area of the square on the radius of a circle of diameter unity = .25. If x - y = xy, firstly, what is the arithmetical value of xy? secondly, what is the angle of which xy represents the circular measure?"

If x represent 15° and y be ¼, xy represents 3° 45', whether x - y be xy or no. But, y being ¼, x - y is not xy unless x be ⅓, that is, unless 12x or π be 4, which Mr. Smith would not admit. How could a person who had just received such a lesson as I had given immediately pray for further exposure, furnishing the stuff so liberally as this? Is it possible that Mr. Smith, because he signs himself Nauticus, means to deny his own very regular, legible, and peculiar hand? It is enough to make the other members of the Liverpool Dock Board cry, Mersey on the man!

Mr. Smith says that for the future he will give up what he calls sarcasm, and confine himself, "as far as possible," to what he calls dry reasoning from incontrovertible premises. If I have fairly taught him that his sarcasm will not succeed, I hope he will find that his wit's end is his logic's beginning.

I now reply to a question I have been asked again and again since my last Budget appeared: Why do you take so much trouble to expose such a reasoner as Mr. Smith? I answer as a deceased friend of mine used to answer on like occasions—A man's capacity is no measure of his power to do mischief. Mr. Smith has untiring energy, which does something; self-evident honesty of conviction, which does more; and a long purse, which does most of all. He has made at least ten publications, full of figures which few readers can criticize. A great many people are staggered to this extent, that they imagine there must be the indefinite something in the mysterious all this. They are brought to the point of suspicion that the mathematicians ought not to treat "all this" with such undisguised contempt, at least. Now I have no fear for π: but I do think it possible that general opinion might in time demand that the crowd of circle-squarers, etc. should be admitted to the honors of opposition; and this would be a time-tax of five per cent., one man with another, upon those who are better employed. Mr. James Smith may be made useful, in hands which understand how to do it, towards preventing such opinion from growing. A speculator who expressly assumes what he wants to prove, and argues that all which contradicts it is absurd, because it cannot stand side by side with his assumption, is a case which can be exposed to all. And the best person to expose it is one who has lived in the past as well as the present, who takes misthinking from points of view which none but a student of history can occupy, and who has something of a turn for the business.

Whether I have any motive but public good must be referred to those who can decide whether a missionary chooses his pursuit solely to convert the heathen. I shall certainly be thought to have a little of the spirit of Col. Quagg, who delighted in strapping the Grace-walking Brethren. I must quote this myself: if I do not, some one else will, and then where am I? The Colonel's principle is described as follows:

"I licks ye because I kin, and because I like, and because ye'se critters that licks is good for. Skins ye have on, and skins I'll have off; hard or soft, wet or dry, spring or fall. Walk in grace if ye like till pumpkins is peaches; but licked ye must be till your toe-nails drop off and your noses bleed blue ink. And—licked—they—were—accordingly."

I am reminded of this by the excessive confidence with which Mr. James Smith predicted that he would treat me as Zephaniah Stockdolloger (Sam Slick calls it slockdollager) treated Goliah Quagg. He has announced his intention of bringing me, with a contrite heart, and clean shaved,—4159265... razored down to 25,—to a camp-meeting of circle-squarers. But there is this difference: Zephaniah only wanted to pass the Colonel's smithy in peace; Mr. James Smith sought a fight with me. As soon as this Budget began to appear, he oiled his own strap, and attempted to treat me as the terrible Colonel would have treated the inoffensive brother.

He is at liberty to try again.

THE MOON HOAX.

 * The Moon-hoax; or the discovery that the moon has a vast population of human beings. By Richard Adams Locke. New York, 1859, 8vo.

This is a reprint of the hoax already mentioned. I suppose R. A. Locke is the name assumed by M. Nicollet. The publisher informs us that when the hoax first appeared day by day in a morning paper, the circulation increased fivefold, and the paper obtained a permanent footing. Besides this, an edition of 60,000 was sold off in less than one month.

The discovery was also published under the name of A. R. Grant. Sohncke's Bibliotheca Mathematica confounds this Grant with Prof. R. Grant of Glasgow, the author of the History of Physical Astronomy, who is accordingly made to guarantee the discoveries in the moon. I hope Adams Locke will not merge in J. C. Adams, the co-discoverer of Neptune. Sohncke gives the titles of three French translations of the Moon hoax at Paris, of one at Bordeaux, and of Italian translations at Parma, Palermo, and Milan.

A Correspondent, who is evidently fully master of details, which he has given at length, informs me that the Moon hoax appeared first in the New York Sun, of which R. A. Locke was editor. It so much resembled a story then recently published by Edgar A. Poe, in a Southern paper, "Adventures of Hans Pfaal," that some New York journals published the two side by side. Mr. Locke, when he left the New York Sun, started another paper, and discovered the manuscript of Mungo Park; but this did not deceive. The Sun, however, continued its career, and had a great success in an account of a balloon voyage from England to America, in seventy-five hours, by Mr. Monck Mason, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and others. I have no doubt that M. Nicollet was the author of the Moon hoax, written in a way which marks the practised observatory astronomer beyond all doubt, and by evidence seen in the most minute details. Nicollet had an eye to Europe. I suspect that he took Poe's story, and made it a basis for his own. Mr. Locke, it would seem, when he attempted a fabrication for himself, did not succeed.


 * The Earth we inhabit, its past, present, and future. By Capt. Drayson. London, 1859, 8vo.

The earth is growing; absolutely growing larger: its diameter increases three-quarters of an inch per mile every year. The foundations of our buildings will give way in time: the telegraph cables break, and no cause ever assigned except ships' anchors, and such things. The book is for those whose common sense is unwarped, who can judge evidence as well as the ablest philosopher. The prospect is not a bad one, for population increases so fast that a larger earth will be wanted in time, unless emigration to the Moon can be managed, a proposal of which it much surprises me that Bishop Wilkins has a monopoly.

IMPALEMENT BY REQUEST.
Athenæum, August, 19, 1865. Notice to Correspondents.

"R. W.—If you will consult the opening chapter of the Budget of Paradoxes, you will see that the author presents only works in his own library at a given date; and this for a purpose explained. For ourselves we have carefully avoided allowing any writers to present themselves in our columns on the ground that the Budget has passed them over. We gather that Mr. De Morgan contemplates additions at a future time, perhaps in a separate and augmented work; if so, those who complain that others of no greater claims than themselves have been ridiculed may find themselves where they wish to be. We have done what we can for you by forwarding your letter to Mr. De Morgan."

The author of "An Essay on the Constitution of the Earth," published in 1844, demanded of the Athenæum, as an act of fairness, that a letter from him should be published, proving that he had as much right to be "impaled" as Capt. Drayson. He holds, on speculative grounds, what the other claims to have proved by measurement, namely, that the earth is growing; and he believes that in time—a good long time, not our time—the earth and other planets may grow into suns, with systems of their own.

This gentleman sent me a copy of his work, after the commencement of my Budget; but I have no recollection of having received it, and I cannot find it on the (nursery? quarantine?) shelves on which I keep my unestablished discoveries. Had I known of this work in time, (see the Introduction) I should of course, have impaled it (heraldically) with the other work; but the two are very different. Capt. Drayson professes to prove his point by results of observation; and I think he does not succeed. The author before me only speculates; and a speculator can get any conclusion into his premises, if he will only build or hire them of shape and size to suit. It reminds me of a statement I heard years ago, that a score of persons, or near it, were to dine inside the skull of one of the aboriginal animals, dear little creatures! Whereat I wondered vastly, nothing doubting; facts being stubborn and not easy drove, as Mrs. Gamp said. But I soon learned that the skull was not a real one, but artificially constructed by the methods—methods which have had striking verifications, too—which enable zoologists to go the whole hog by help of a toe or a bit of tail. This took off the edge of the wonder: a hundred people can dine inside an inference, if you draw it large enough. The method might happen to fail for once: for instance, the toe-bone might have been abnormalized by therian or saurian malady; and the possibility of such failure, even when of small probability, is of great alleviation. The author before me is, apparently, the sole fabricator of his own premises. With vital force in the earth and continual creation on the part of the original Creator, he expands our bit of a residence as desired. But, as the Newtoness of Cookery observed, First catch your hare. When this is done, when you have a growing earth, you shall dress it with all manner of proximate causes, and serve it up with a growing Moon for sauce, a growing Sun, if it please you, at the other end, and growing planets for side-dishes. Hoping this amount of impalement will be satisfactory, I go on to something else.