Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/431

Rh investigations, otherwise he would certainly have anticipated the important discovery it had fallen to his own lot to make.

In the meantime the Commissioners, who had each wished to appropriate to himself the discovery of the circle, now thought that this usurpation of it by their chairman was most unjust towards the unpretending member who had really made it. They therefore advised him to claim his own discovery, and promised to back him in asserting it.

But their chairman really was a clever fellow, and deep as Silurian rocks. Aware of the importance of the discovery thus appropriated, he had already visited the modest Commissioner—had overwhelmed him with compliments, and had also prevailed upon that other influential Commissioner whom he had so well buttered in his Report, to give him a small piece of preferment, which had been accepted by his victim:—thus putting a padlock upon his lips, which his brother Commissioners were unable either to unlock or to pick.

After the Report was presented, more speeches were made—more medals given, but the plague continued, and their universe was depopulated.

A third Commission was afterwards sent, who reported that they found at the spot previously reached, on either side, two vast circles, the diameter of each of which was one hundred times the height of an ordinary individual; that the material occupying space within the circle differed slightly from that without it; and that it appeared as if a vast cylinder of space had been pushed through without disturbing the matter external to it. They also reported that the former Commissioners had never approached the origin of the mischief, but had simply worked their way, at right angles, to a