392 MY LIFE 



to write to all manner of people, challenging them to prove 

 that the earth was not flat, for several years after. The last 

 of his efforts which I have preserved is an eight-page tract, 

 which he distributed at the Royal Geographical Society's Ex- 

 hibition of Geographical Appliances, in December, 1885, in 

 which he attacks all geographical teaching in his usual style, 

 and declares that " at the present moment they are cowering 

 beneath the inquiring gaze of one single truth-seeker, John 

 Hampden, the well-known champion of the Mosaic cos- 

 mogony as against the infidel theories and superstitions of 

 the pagan mystics, who is, at the end of fifteen years' conflict, 

 still holding his ground against all the professional authorities 

 of England and America ; and the single fact that during the 

 whole of that time, no one but a degraded swindler has dared 

 to make a fraudulent attempt to support the globular theory, 

 is ample and overwhelming proofs of the worthless character 

 of modern elementary geography." And again : " Surveyors 

 and civil and military engineers are offered £100 for the 

 discovery of any portion of the earth's curvature, on land or 

 ivater, railway or canal, of not less than five or ten miles, 

 within one hundred miles of the metropolis. Why does not 

 Mr. A. R. Wallace do again what he says he has done be- 

 fore?' And in a list of advertisements of books, etc., sup- 

 porting his views he has this one : " Scientific Information 

 wanted. A gentleman of ample means and inquisitive disposi- 

 tion offers £100 for particulars setting forth conclusively the 

 grounds on which Sir Isaac Newton's Globular Theory was 

 presumably established or asserted to be the fact." 



And this man was educated at Oxford University ! Seldom 

 has so much boldness of assertion and force of invective been 

 combined with such gross ignorance. And to this day a 

 society exists to uphold the views of Hampden, Carpenter, 

 and their teacher, " Parallax ! " 



The two law suits, the four prosecutions for libel, the 

 payments and costs of the settlement, amounted to consider- 

 ably more than the £500 I received from Hampden, besides 

 which I bore all the costs of the week's experiments, and 

 between fifteen and twenty years of continued persecution — a 



