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Rh 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 lke 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—

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:—

[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