I think I have done Sir G. Lewis's very excellent book more good than all the reviewers put together.
I will give an old instance in which literature got into confusion about astronomy. Theophrastus,[[292]] who is either the culprit or his historian, attributes to Meton,[[293]] the contriver of the lunar calendar of nineteen years, which lasts to this day, that his solstices were determined for him by a certain Phaeinus of Elis on Mount Lycabettus. Nobody else mentions this astronomer: though it is pretty certain that Meton himself made more than one appointment with him for the purpose of observing solstices; and we may be sure that if either were behind his time, it was Meton. For Phaeinus Helius is the shining sun himself; and in the astronomical poet Aratus[[294]] we read about the nineteen years of the shining sun:
Ἐννεακαιδέκα κύκλα φαεινοῦ ἠελίοιο.[[295]]
Some man of letters must have turned Apollo into Phaeinus of Elis; and there he is in the histories of astronomy to
this day. Salmasius[[296]] will have Aratus to have meant him, and proposes to read ἠλείοιο: he did not observe that Phaeinus is a very common adjective of Aratus, and that, if his conjecture were right, this Phaeinus would be the only non-mythical man in the poems of Aratus.
[When I read Sir George Lewis's book, the points which I have criticized struck me as not to be wondered at, but I did not remember why at the time. A Chancellor of the Exchequer and a writer on ancient astronomy are birds of such different trees that the second did not recall the first. In 1855 I was one of a deputation of about twenty persons who waited on Sir G. Lewis, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the subject of a decimal coinage. The deputation was one of much force: Mr. Airy, with myself and others, represented mathematics; William Brown,[[297]] whose dealings with the United States were reckoned by yearly millions, counted duodecimally in England and decimally in America, was the best, but not the only, representative of commerce. There were bullionists, accountants, retailers, etc. Sir G. L. walked into the room, took his seat, and without waiting one moment, began to read the deputation a smart lecture on the evils of a decimal coinage; it would require alteration of all the tables, it would impede calculation, etc. etc. Of those arguments against it which weighed with many of better knowledge than his, he obviously knew nothing. The members of the deputation began to make their statements, and met with curious denials. He interrupted me with "Surely there is no doubt that the calculations of our books of arithmetic are easier
than those in the French books." He was not aware that the universally admitted superiority of decimal calculation made many of those who prefer our system for the market and the counter cast a longing and lingering look towards decimals. My answer and the smiles which he saw around, made him give a queer puzzled look, which seemed to say, "I may be out of my depth here!" His manner changed, and he listened. I saw both the slap-dash mode in which he dealt with subjects on which he had not thought, and the temperament which admitted suspicion when the means of knowledge came in his way. Having seen his two phases, I wonder neither at his more than usual exhibition of shallowness when shallow, nor at the intensity of the contrast when he had greater depth.]
DECIMAL COINAGE.
Among the paradoxers are the political paradoxers who care not how far they go in debate, their only object being to carry the House with them for the current evening. What I have said of editors I repeat of them. The preservation of a very marked instance, the association of political recklessness with cyclometrical and Apocalyptic absurdity, may have a tendency to warn, not indeed any hardened public-man and sinner, but some young minds which have yearnings towards politics, and are in formation of habits.
In the debate on decimal coinage of July 12, 1855, Mr. Lowe,[[298]] then member for Kidderminster, an effective speaker and a smart man, exhibited himself in a speech on which I wrote a comment for the Decimal Association. I have seldom seen a more wretched attempt to distort the points of a public question than the whole of this speech. Looking at the intelligence shown by the speaker on other occasions,