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 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. Groulden'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, &c.—Why a pendulum vibrates with less velocity at the Equator than at the Pole.—The allowance for rotundity supposed to be made by