252 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[2°<« S. VI. 143., Sept. 25. '58. 



the elasticity of the air?" "It does no such 

 thing," answered the intended victim ; " it de- 

 pends on the difference of the elasticities of the 

 air in the two places." The examiner saw by the 

 smile on the faces of his colleagues that it will not 

 do to be popularly correct in assailing those who 

 are correctly correct. 



I did not insinuate that Swift had " overlooked" 

 the distinction between cones and cylinders as solids 

 and parallelograms as superficies : nothing can be 

 overlooked except what is known : I doubted whe- 

 ther Swift knew the distinction. Neither do I at 

 all admit that a superficies is " vox et prseterea 

 nihil." 



Writers of fiction spoil the characters they are 

 drawing by putting ignorance into their mouths 

 when they intend them to be learned. This should 

 only be done by those who feel conscious of hav- 

 ing but their day to live. Walter Scott makes 

 his absent scholar, the minister of St. Ronan's, 

 puzzled because Ingulphus and GeofFry Wine- 

 sauf do not agree about a point in the geography 

 of Palestine. The second wrote an Itinerary, or 

 at least his authorship was not questioned in 

 Walter Scott's time : but the first wrote nothing 

 at all about Palestine ; he had been there as a 

 pilgrim, which probably led to the mistake. Now 

 though an author may be pardoned for an ana- 

 chronism, or for a few nou-existing personages 

 introduced into history, because the necessities of 

 the fiction have no law, the license does not ex- 

 tend to invention for the sake of saving a {qvt 

 minutes' search for an author's name. Who was 

 it who recommended his son never to tell a lie 

 when truth would do as well ? If not Chester- 

 field, somebody very like him ; but whoever he 

 was, he laid down an excellent rule for a novelist. 

 Koger Bacon might have taken the place of In- 

 gulphus, and those who happen to know the monk 

 of Croyland would not have had their writ of 

 incredulus odi against the great magician. 



Swift's wrong satire about the tailor's quadrant 

 is not "rendered necessary" by my proposed sub- 

 stitute having been used up at Lilliput : because 

 there were plenty of other alternatives. In fact, 

 if Swift had been up to his work, he would have 

 made the Lilliputian method a basis for the more 

 mathematical method of the Laputans. He would 

 have made the latter proceed upon a geometrical 

 mean between the rounds of the thumb and of the 

 great toe, or some such refinement : and in bring- 

 iiig out the clothes ill made, which was his object, 

 and which he might then have properly attributed 

 to a wrong figure in the calculation, he might 

 have taken occasion to show the advantage of the 

 Lilliputian method. And fiirther, a writer is 

 hardly fit to handle mathematicians who calls 

 " Twice round the thumb once round the wrist," 

 &c., a " mathematical computation." Does any 

 one call " two pints one quart, four quarts oue 



gallon," &c. a mathematical computation ? And 

 farther still, this method, mathematical or not, 

 was in actual use by the English seamstresses and 

 tailors of Swift's time, and may be to this day, for 

 rough help. 



I said I would discuss any mathematician whom i 

 any one of your correspondents would name as ' 

 being one of whom Swift's Laputan is a fair cari- 

 cature. In reply to this challenge. Me. Hen- 

 bury begins by asking for a categorical answer to 

 the question whether the story of Newton cut- 

 ting a large hole for the large cat and a small 

 hole for the small one, is "fact or fiction." 

 This story is from the jest books, and has never 

 been discussed, that I know of, by biographers. 

 To the question I answer that I do not know, 

 but that first, no evidence has ever been pro- 

 duced ; secondly, the stoiy is a stock story, older j 

 than Newton. I cannot recall where I have seen 1 

 it, but I dare say some of your readers will throw 

 it back, either on Hierocles himself, or on some 

 follower before the time of Joe Miller. I may add, 

 that Humphrey Newton, the amanuensis, says, 

 " He kept neither dog nor cat in his chamber." 

 There is another story, quite as good, also from 

 the jest books. It is that Newton, in a fit of ab- 

 sence, used a lady's finger as a tobacco-stopper ; 

 she imagining that he seized her hand to make a 

 declaration. But Conduitt's notes put a serious 

 difficulty in the way of this anecdote. They state 

 that when Newton was asked to take snuff or 

 tobacco he always declined, saying that he would 

 make no necessities to himself. Whether by this 

 he meant, iider alia, that he desired to avoid the 

 necessity of burning the end of a fair finger, I 

 cannot undertake to say : but the statement seems 

 to require the inference that he did avoid it. 



I am next asked whether the anecdotes of 

 Newton's absence of mind do not show that the 

 flapper would have been a most useful companion ? 

 I answer, first, that even supposing them rightly 

 named, they do not show any such thing : a flap- 

 per might have flapped the contents of the Prin^ 

 cipia out of existence as fast as they came into it. 

 Halley is the flapper for my money, who flapped 

 Newton into writing what was in his m.ind ; and 

 very hard he had to flap ; and he organised the 

 Royal Society into a body of deputy-flappers : and 

 poor Newton, flapped on all sides, got through 

 the author-work of the Principia in eighteen 

 months, the most splendid flapping job that ever 

 was done. 



Secondly, I never yet read any anecdote of 

 Newton denoting absence of mind. Absence of 

 mind means a wandering from the subject pro- 

 perly before it into another. If Newton, during 

 business at the Mint, or lecturing in the Univer- 

 sity, or in discussion in the House of Commons, 

 or in conversation with his friends, had fallen off 

 into mathematics, or anything else, he would have 



