120 Reviews and Notices of Books. 
riches in certain quarters. We have on our table a treatise (or 
rather a series of treatises) printed in Calcutta in 1858, of which 
the title is, “ The Moon is the Image of the Earth, and is not a 
Solid Body.” We were wont to regard this as a masterpiece in 
its way, but it pales before Mr Smith’s work. Perhaps this may 
be explained by the fact that the author of the treatise on the 
moon is evidently serious; and we know that truth, although it 
may be stranger than fiction, is not nearly so attractive. Besides, 
the author of the shadow-moon may be right. No one has 
climbed up so high as to touch the moon, to convince himself that 
it is a substantial solid body, and no shadow. The green-cheese 
theory is certainly losing supporters. After all, it may be but an 
image; but the circle is not in the same predicament: we can 
get at it, and measure it too; at any rate with sufficient accuracy to 
be in a position to render it a difficult task for him to execute 
who undertakes to cheat us into the admission that its cireum- 
ference is exactly 31 times its diameter. Hence arises the great 
attractiveness, the elaborate getting-up, of the work before us. 
Our second remark is, that the search after unattainable results 
has in past times been productive of much good. Who can say 
how much chemistry owes to the philosopher’s stone—to the 
transmutation of metals? Who can count the discoveries which 
have had their germ in perpetual motion? Who can estimate the 
influence which the quadrature of the circle has exercised on the 
progress of geometry? But these are fruits reaped by genera- 
tions long passed away ;—the problems are sadly out of date now. 
We would advise any gentleman who has plenty of spare money 
to invest it in some newer chimera. We would venture to suggest 
the great sea-serpent as the subject for the next first of April. 
Well, let this suffice. We have no sympathy with those who 
frown hard on the perpetual-motionists and the squarers of the 
circle. We have learnt to admire the perseverance and self- 
denial of men who can give up their time and their money for the 
pursuit, misdirected though it be, of abstract truth. They are 
usually simple, single-hearted men, with no worldly motives to 
influence them. We retain an affectionate remembrance of a . 
gentleman who did us the honour to dedicate his treatise on the 
quadrature of the circle to ourselves. 
To be sure, we had on one occasion to deal with a man of a 
different stamp. A poor, half-starved, half-witted fellow had 
taken the trouble to travel on foot all the way from Yorkshire to 
Edinburgh, to lay before us his discovery ; and when he had gone 
through his story about segments and sectors, cosines and versed 
sines, and all the rest, to which we paid the same respectful atten- 
tion that we would have done to him who should assure us he 
had performed the well-known feat of jumping down his own 
throat,—when he had emptied himself of his science, we perceived 
