124 



1#TES AND QUERIES. CS"" s. vi. 137., Aug. 14. m 



same time with Gulliver. It is worth notice that 

 there is a faint resemblance to the leading idea of 

 the travels, in a letter from Arbuthuot to Swift, 

 so far back as 1714: the travels appearing in 

 1726 and 1727. Arbuthnot is describing what he 

 intends to do with Martinus Scriblerus, who is 

 to have a theory that the effect of a medicine is 

 inversely as the bulk of the patient, whence he is 

 to infer the comparative sizes of the ancients and 

 moderns from the quantities of their doses. 



Swift has masked with so much art the arith- 

 metical questions which arise, that the interest of 

 the I'eader is well preserved. If any one had been 

 made to see, on opening the book, that the Lilli- 

 putian scale is one inch to each of our feet, and 

 the Brobdingnagian one foot to each of our inches, 

 he would have felt that the author had not left 

 himself much to calculate. I have no doubt that 

 many of your readers will admit that they never 

 collected, from the actual travels, the idea of this 

 simple proportion running through the whole. It 

 is only let out gradually, and under precautions. 

 The first Lilliputiiin who enters on the scene is 

 described as " a human creature not six inches 

 high." Fortunately for Swift, the average stature 

 of a man must be described as " not six feet : " 

 had it been six feet, with nothing to speak of 

 more or less, he must have discovered the scale at 

 the very outset. In like manner, the first definite 

 indication of the Brobdingnagian stature is con- 

 veyed m the description of a monster who " took 

 about ten yards at every stride : " the average 

 human step is thirty inches, the twelfth part of ten 

 yards. 



There would have been no difficulty about the 

 proportions of lengths : but it may be questioned 

 whether Swift would, without assistance, have 

 given a true account of solid proportions. Gil- 

 bert "White was a very keen observer, but he 

 printed a tremendous mistake (Nat. Hist, of Sel- 

 horne. Letter xci.) which has not, I think, been 

 noticed by any of his commentators. A plover 

 having legs eight inches long to four ounces and a 

 quarter of weight, he presumes that a flamingo, 

 weighing four pounds, ought to have legs ten 

 feet long, to be as longlegged a bird, for its weight, 

 as the plover. For ten feet he ought to have said 

 twenty inches ; which is about what the flamingo 

 actually has. Swift is correct enough on such 

 points, to the surprise, no doubt, of some of his 

 readers, who may be puzzled to know how i' is 

 that a large Lilliputian hogshead only holds half 

 a pint. Some readers will say (as White would 

 have done) that this is making our hogsheads hold 

 only twelve half pints: but for 12 should be 

 read 12 x 12 X 12 or 1728. Thus the cask which 

 Gulliver emptied at a draught answei's to 108 gal- 

 lons in one of our hogsheads, and this would be the 

 Brobdingnagian half-pint. Tliis 1728 is, however, 

 put down ;xs 172-1 in the description of the num- 



ber of daily dinners allowed to the Man-moun- 

 tain ; a slight mistake in multiplication. If there 

 be a point in which Swift has overdone the mon- 

 ster, it is when he makes him drag after him 

 fifty line-of- battle ships, which had held 30,000 

 men. Swift therefore supposes that a man, up to 

 his neck in watei", could drag by a rope a mass 

 equal to 50-1728ths of a line-of-battle ship of his 

 own time. This is a feat of the following kind. 

 Make a model of an average line-of-battle ship of 

 Swift's time on a linear scale of 4-13ths; that is, 

 for every 13 feet let the model have 4 feet. Fill 

 the model with stores of the proper size, but let 

 there be neither guns nor crew. Could a man up 

 to his neck in water drag this model after him ? 

 I think not. Or put it thus: The 30,000 men 

 who jumped out of their ships when they saw 

 what was coming would amount in weight and 

 bulk to a little more than seventeen men of our 

 size. Could a man, up to his neck in water, drag 

 the boat which would hold seventeen men not 

 closely packed? Probably not; and still less 

 could Gulliver have dragged the ships. 



There is one point which it probably never 

 entered into Swift's head to provide for. He evi- 

 dently means the force of gravity to be same in 

 Lilliput as in England. Now, in order to judge of 

 the relation of a Lilliputian to gravity by making 

 the case our own, we must proceed thus. Imagine 

 gravitation to be augmented into a force of such 

 energy that a stone should fall twelve times as far 

 in the first second as it now does : it is plain that 

 our bodies, knit together as they now are, would not 

 support their own weight. Gulliver's Lilliputians, 

 such as Swift meant them to be, would have been 

 mechanical impossibilities, unless their muscular 

 power had been such that a much smaller number 

 of them than Swift intended could have held down 

 the man-mountain by main force. The fiction 

 corresponding to Gulliver, as to the matter of 

 gravitation, has been written in our own day. It 

 is the " Tale of a Chemist," which first appeared, 

 I think, in Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and was 

 reprinted in 1846 in Knight's Penny Magazine 

 (vol. ii. p. 177.). This chemist learns how to 

 pump the gravity out of his own body, and goes 

 through a number of adventures in consequence. 



It has not, so far as I can find, been noted by 

 the commentators that the Lilliputian religion is 

 by no means uncommon among us : not indeed 

 that its followers form a distinct sect, but that they 

 are scattered through all persuasions. Gulliver has 

 given only one of their doctrines, but that one is 

 quite enough to substantiate my assertion : it is 

 contained in the following words, " All true be- 

 lievers break their eggs at the convenient end." 



The voyage to Laputa is pronounced by John- 

 son to be the least amusing of the Gulliver fictions. 

 Swift is here attempting to ridicule a class of 

 men of whom he knew nothing; and his success 



