"The Earth a Plane—How circumnavigated.—How time is lost or gained.—Why a ship's hull disappears (when outward bound) before the mast head.—Why the Polar Star sets when we proceed Southward, etc.—Why a pendulum vibrates with less velocity at the Equator than
at the Pole.—The allowance for rotundity supposed to be made by surveyors, not made in practice.—Measurement of Arcs of the Meridian unsatisfactory.—Degrees of Longitude North and South of the Equator considered.—Eclipses and Earth's form considered.—The Earth no motion on axis or in orbit.—How the Sun moves above the Earth's surface concentric with the North Pole.—Cause of Day and Night, Winter and Summer; the long alternation of light and darkness at the Pole.—Cause of the Sun rising and setting.—Distance of the Sun from London, 4,028 miles—How measured.—Challenge to Mathematicians.—Cause of Tides.—Moon self-luminous, NOT a reflector.—Cause of Solar and Lunar eclipses.—Stars not worlds; their distance.—Earth, the only material world; its true position in the universe; its condition and ultimate destruction by fire (2 Peter iii.), etc."
I wish there were geoplatylogical lectures in every town; in England (platylogical, in composition, need not mean babbling). The late Mr. Henry Archer[[185]] would, if alive, be very much obliged to me for recording his vehement denial of the roundness of the earth: he was excited if he heard any one call it a globe. I cannot produce his proof from the Pyramids, and from some caves in Arabia. He had other curious notions, of course: I should no more believe that a flat earth was a man's only paradox, than I should that Dutens,[[186]] the editor of Leibnitz, was eccentric only in supplying a tooth which he had lost by one which he found in an Italian tomb, and fully believed that it had once belonged to Scipio Africanus, whose family vault was discovered, it is supposed, in 1780. Mr. Archer is of note as
the suggester of the perforated border of the postage-stamps, and, I think, of the way of doing it; for this he got 4000l. reward. He was a civil engineer.
(August 28, 1865.) The Zetetic Astronomy has come into my hands. When, in 1851, I went to see the Great Exhibition, I heard an organ played by a performer who seemed very desirous to exhibit one particular stop. "What do you think of that stop?" I was asked.—"That depends on the name of it," said I.—"Oh! what can the name have to do with the sound? 'that which we call a rose,' etc."—"The name has everything to do with it: if it be a flute-stop, I think it very harsh; but if it be a railway-whistle-stop, I think it very sweet." So as to this book: if it be childish, it is clever; if it be mannish, it is unusually foolish. The flat earth, floating tremulously on the sea; the sun moving always over the flat, giving day when near enough, and night when too far off; the self-luminous moon, with a semi-transparent invisible moon, created to give her an eclipse now and then; the new law of perspective, by which the vanishing of the hull before the masts, usually thought to prove the earth globular, really proves it flat;—all these and other things are well fitted to form exercises for a person who is learning the elements of astronomy. The manner in which the sun dips into the sea, especially in tropical climates, upsets the whole. Mungo Park,[[187]] I think, gives an African hypothesis which explains phenomena better than this. The sun dips into the western ocean, and the people there cut him in pieces, fry him in a pan, and then join him together again, take him round the underway, and set him up in the east. I hope this book will be read, and that many will be puzzled by it: for there are many whose notions of astronomy deserve no better fate. There is no subject on which there is so little
accurate conception as that of the motions of the heavenly bodies. The author, though confident in the extreme, neither impeaches the honesty of those whose opinions he assails, nor allots them any future inconvenience: in these points he is worthy to live on a globe, and to revolve in twenty-four hours.
(October, 1866.) A follower appears, in a work dedicated to the preceding author: it is Theoretical Astronomy examined and exposed by Common Sense. The author has 128 well-stuffed octavo pages. I hope he will not be the last. He prints the newspaper accounts of his work: the Church Times says—not seeing how the satire might be retorted—"We never began to despair of Scripture until we discovered that 'Common Sense' had taken up the cudgels in its defence." This paper considers our author as the type of a Protestant. The author himself, who gives a summary of his arguments in verse, has one couplet which is worth quoting:
"How is't that sailors, bound to sea, with a 'globe' would never start,
But in its place will always take Mercator's[[188]] Level chart!"
To which I answer: