800 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



it ; and a remark to be added is that some minds appear incapable of 

 distinguishing between intrinsic absurdity and extrinsic absurdity. 

 The case before us illustrates this remark ; and at the same time 

 shows us how analytical faculties of one kind may be constantly exer- 

 cised without strengthening analytical faculties of another kind how 

 mathematical analysis may be daily practiced without any skill in 

 psychological analysis being acquired. For, if these gentlemen had 

 analyzed their own thoughts to any purpose, they would have known 

 that incongruous juxtapositions may, by association of ideas, suggest 

 characters that do not at all belong to the things juxtaposed. Did Mr. 

 Kirkman ever observe the result of putting a bonnet on a nude statue? 

 If he ever did, and if he then reasoned after the manner exemplified 

 above, he doubtless concluded that the obscene effect belonged intrin- 

 sically to the statue, and only required the addition of the bonnet to 

 make it conspicuous. The alternative conclusion, however, which per- 

 haps most will draw, is that not in the statue itself was there anything 

 of an obscene suggestion, but that this effect was purely adventitious : 

 the bonnet, connected in daily experience with living women, calling 

 up the thought of a living woman with the head dressed but otherwise 

 naked. Similarly though, by clothing an idea in words which excite a 

 feeling of the ludicrous by their oddity, any one may associate this 

 feeling of the ludicrous with the idea itself, yet he does not thereby 

 make the idea ludicrous ; and, if he thinks he does, he shows that he 

 has not practiced introspection to much purpose. 



By way of a lesson in mental discipline, it may be not uninstructive 

 here to note a curious kinship of opinion between these two mathema- 

 ticians and two litterateurs. At first sight it appears strange that men, 

 whose lives are passed in studies so absolutely scientific as those which 

 Professor Tait and Mr. Kirkman pursue, should, in their judgments on 

 the formula of evolution, be at one with two men of exclusively literary 

 culture a North American Reviewer and Mr. Matthew Arnold. In 

 the " North American Review," vol. cxx., page 202, a critic, after quot- 

 ing the formula of evolution, says, " This may be all true, but it seems 

 at best rather the blank form for a universe than anything correspond- 

 ing to the actual world about us." On which the comment may be, 

 that one, who had studied celestial mechanics as much as the critic has 

 studied the general course of transformations, might similarly have 

 remarked that the formula, "bodies attract one another directly as 

 their masses and inversely as the squares of their distances," was at 

 best but a blank form for solar systems and sidereal clusters. With this 

 parenthetical comment, I pass to the fact above hinted, that Mr. Mat- 

 thew Arnold obviously coincides with the critic's estimate of the for- 

 mula. In Chapter V. of his work " God and the Bible," when prepar- 

 ing the way for a criticism on German theologians as losing them- 

 selves in words, he quotes a saying from Homer. This he introduces 

 by remarking that "it is not at all a grand one. We are almost 



