"Walsh Irelandus."
Mr. Walsh—honor to his memory—once had the consideration to save me postage by addressing a pamphlet under cover to a Member of Parliament, with an explanatory letter. In that letter he gives a candid opinion of himself:
(1838.) "Mr. Walsh takes leave to send the enclosed corrected copy to Mr. Hutton as one of the Council of the University of London, and to save postage for the Professor of Mathematics there. He will find in it geometry more deep and subtle, and at the same time more simple and elegant, than it was ever contemplated human genius could invent."
He then proceeds to set forth that a certain "tomfoolery lemma," with its "tomfoolery" superstructure, "never had existence outside the shallow brains of its inventor," Euclid. He then proceeds thus:
"The same spirit that animated those philosophers who sent Galileo to the Inquisition animates all the philosophers of the present day without exception. If anything can free them from the yoke of error, it is the [Walsh] problem of double tangence. But free them it will, how deeply soever they may be sunk into mental slavery—and God knows that is deeply enough; and they bear it with an admirable grace; for none bear slavery with a better grace than tyrants. The lads must adopt my theory.... It will be a sad reverse for all our great professors to be compelled to become schoolboys in their gray years. But the sore scratch is to be compelled, as they had before been compelled one thousand years ago, to have recourse to Ireland for instruction."
The following "Impromptu" is no doubt by Walsh himself: he was more of a poet than of an astronomer:
"Through ages unfriended,
With sophistry blended,
Deep science in Chaos had slept;