The above was not a bad guess. A little after the time when the famous Pascal papers[[18]] were produced, I came into possession of a correspondence which, but for these papers, I should have held too incredible to be put before the world. But when one sheep leaps the ditch, another will follow: so I gave the following account in the Athenæum of October 5, 1867:
"The recorded story is that Michael Scott, being bound by contract to produce perpetual employment for a number of young demons, was worried out of his life in inventing jobs for them, until at last he set them to make ropes out of sea sand, which they never could do. We have obtained a very curious correspondence between the wizard Michael and his demon-slaves; but we do not feel at liberty to say how it came into our hands. We much regret that we did not receive it in time for the British Association. It appears that the story, true as far as it goes, was never finished. The demons easily conquered the rope difficulty, by the simple process of making the sand into glass, and spinning the glass into thread, which they twisted. Michael, thoroughly disconcerted, hit upon the plan of setting some to
square the circle, others to find the perpetual motion, etc. He commanded each of them to transmigrate from one human body into another, until their tasks were done. This explains the whole succession of cyclometers, and all the heroes of the Budget. Some of this correspondence is very recent; it is much blotted, and we are not quite sure of its meaning: it is full of figurative allusions to driving something illegible down a steep into the sea. It looks like a humble petition to be allowed some diversion in the intervals of transmigration; and the answer is—
Rumpat et serpens iter institutum,[[19]]
—a line of Horace, which the demons interpret as a direction to come athwart the proceedings of the Institute by a sly trick. Until we saw this, we were suspicious of M. Libri,[[20]] the unvarying blunders of the correspondence look like knowledge. To be always out of the road requires a map: genuine ignorance occasionally lapses into truth. We thought it possible M. Libri might have played the trick to show how easily the French are deceived; but with our present information, our minds are at rest on the subject. We see M. Chasles does not like to avow the real source of information: he will not confess himself a spiritualist."
PHILO OF GADARA.
Philo of Gadara[[21]] is asserted by Montucla,[[22]] on the
authority of Eutocius,[[23]] the commentator on Archimedes, to have squared the circle within the ten-thousandth part of a unit, that is, to four places of decimals. A modern classical dictionary represents it as done by Philo to ten thousand places of decimals. Lacroix comments on Montucla to the effect that myriad (in Greek ten thousand) is here used as we use it, vaguely, for an immense number. On looking into Eutocius, I find that not one definite word is said about the extent to which Philo carried the matter. I give a translation of the passage:
"We ought to know that Apollonius Pergæus, in his Ocytocium [this work is lost], demonstrated the same by other numbers, and came nearer, which seems more accurate, but has nothing to do with Archimedes; for, as before said, he aimed only at going near enough for the wants of life. Neither is Porus of Nicæa fair when he takes Archimedes to task for not giving a line accurately equal to the circumference. He says in his Cerii that his teacher, Philo of Gadara, had given a more accurate approximation (εἰς ἀκριβεστέρους ἀριθμοὺς ἀγάγειν) than that of Archimedes, or than 7 to 22. But all these [the rest as well as Philo] miss the intention. They multiply and divide by tens of thousands, which no one can easily do, unless he be versed in the logistics [fractional computation] of Magnus [now unknown]."
Montucla, or his source, ought not to have made this mistake. He had been at the Greek to correct Philo Gadetanus, as he had often been called, and he had brought away