Page:A budget of paradoxes (IA cu31924103990507).pdf/322

 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.), &c.'

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 4,000l. reward. He was a civil engineer.

(August 28, 1865.) The 'Zetetic Astronomy' has come into my handsd. 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," &c.'—'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