"Oh! now's the time of all the year for flowers and fun, the Maydays;
To trim your whiskers, curl your hair, and sinivate the ladies."
If I were asked which I preferred, this system or that of Baron Ferrari[[315]] already mentioned, proceeding by twelves, I should reply, with Candide, when he had the option given of running the gauntlet or being shot: Les volontés sont libres, et je ne veux ni l'un ni l'autre.[[316]] We can imagine a speculator providing such a system for Utopia as it would be in the mind of a Laputan: but to explain how an engineer who has surveyed mankind from Philadelphia to Rostof on the Don should for a moment entertain the idea of such a system being actually adopted, would beat a jury of solar-system-makers, though they were shut up from the beginning of Anuary to the end of Tonborius. When I see such a scheme as this imagined to be practicable, I admire the wisdom of Providence in providing the quadrature of the circle, etc., to open a harmless sphere of action to the possessors of the kind of ingenuity which it displays. Those who cultivate mathematics have a right to speak strongly on such efforts of arithmetic as this: for, to my knowledge, persons who have no knowledge are frequently disposed to imagine that their makers are true brothers of the craft, a little more intelligible than the rest.
SOME SMALL PARADOXERS.
Vis inertiae victa,[[317]] or Fallacies affecting science. By James Reddie.[[318]] London, 1862, 8vo.
An attack on the Newtonian mechanics; revolution by gravitation demonstrably impossible; much to be said for the earth being the immovable center. A good analysis of contents at the beginning, a thing seldom found. The author has followed up his attack in a paper submitted to the British Association, but which it appears the Association declined to consider. It is entitled—
Victoria Toto Cœlo; or, Modern Astronomy recast. London, 1863, 8vo.
At the end is a criticism of Sir G. Lewis's History of Ancient Astronomy.
On the definition and nature of the Science of Political Economy. By H. Dunning Macleod,[[319]] Esq. Cambridge, 1862, 8vo.