Page:A budget of paradoxes (IA cu31924103990507).pdf/320

 justice to professional rule, or personal pique, pride, or prejudice'; meaning, the great mass of those who have studied the subject. But how? Suppose the 'cultivated persons' were to side with the author, would those who have conclusions to draw and applications to make consent to be wrong because the 'general body of intelligent men,' who make no special study of the subject, are against them? They would do no such thing they: would request the general body of intelligent men to find their own astronomy, and welcome. But the truth is, that this intelligent body knows better: and no persons know better that they know better than the speculators themselves.

But suppose the general body were to combine, in opposition to those who have studied. Of course all my list must be admitted to their trial; and then arises the question whether both sides are to be heard. If so, the general body of the intelligent must hear all the established side have to say: that is, they must become just as much of students as the inculpated orthodox themselves. And will they not then get into professional rule, pique, pride, and prejudice, as the others did? But if, which I suspect, they are intended to judge just as they are, they will be in a rare difficulty. All the paradoxers are of like pretensions: they cannot, as a class, be right, for each one contradicts a great many of the rest. There will be the puzzle which silenced the crew of the cutter in Marryat's novel of the Dog Fiend. 'A tog is a tog,' said Jansen.—'Yes,' replied another, 'we all know a dog is a dog; but the question is—Is this dog a dog?' And this question would arise upon every dog of them all.

Though only a travelling 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 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