Page:Carroll - Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.djvu/229

XII] conditions are fulfilled, you get Accelerated Velocity."

"Hardly," I said: "if you will excuse my differing from you. Suppose we apply the theory to horizontal motion. If a bullet is fired horizontally, it"

"it does not move in a straight line," he quietly finished my sentence for me.

"I yield the point," I said. "What did your friend do next?"

"The next thing was to apply the theory, as you rightly suggest, to horizontal motion. But the moving body, ever tending to fall, needs constant support, if it is to move in a true horizontal line. 'What, then,' he asked himself, 'will give constant support to a moving body? And his answer was Human legs!' That was the discovery that immortalised his name!"

"His name being?" I suggested.

"I had not mentioned it," was the gentle reply of my most unsatisfactory informant. "His next step was an obvious one. He took to a diet of suet-dumplings, until his body had become a perfect sphere. Then