376 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



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 £ioo for the discovery of any portion 

 of the earth's curvature, on land or water, 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 before? " And in a list of ad- 

 vertisements of books, etc., supporting his views he has this 

 one : " Scientific Information wanted. A gentleman of ample 

 means and inquisitive disposition offers £ioo 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 

 tolerably severe punishment for what I did not at the time 

 recognize as an ethical lapse. 



There is one other small money matter which I wish to 

 put on record here, because, though it involves only the small 

 sum of sixpence, it affords an example of official meanness, 

 and what really amounts to petty larceny, which can hardly 

 be surpassed. In 1865 the British Museum purchased from 

 me some specimen (I think a skeleton) for which they agreed 

 to pay £s> Two years later I received the following printed 

 form : — 



