[37].—The Crescent and the Cross.
"By the toes of St. Moden," exclaimed Sir Hugh de Fortibus when this puzzle was brought up, "my poor wit hath never shaped a more cunning artifice or any more bewitching to look upon. It came to me as in a vision, and ofttimes have I marvelled at the thing, seeing its exceeding difficulty. My masters and kinsmen, it is done in this wise."
The worthy knight then pointed out that the crescent was of a particular and somewhat irregular form—the two distances a to b and c to d being straight lines, and the arcs ac and bd being precisely similar. He showed that if the cuts be made as in Figure 1, the four pieces will fit together and form a perfect square, as shown in Figure 2, if we there only regard the three curved lines. By now making the straight cuts also shown in Figure 2, we get the ten pieces that fit together, as in Figure 3, and form a perfectly symmetrical Greek cross. The proportions of the crescent and the cross in the original illustration were correct, and the solution can be demonstrated to be absolutely exact and not merely approximate.
I have a solution in considerably fewer pieces, but it is far more difficult to understand than the above method, in which the problem is simplified by introducing the intermediate square.
[38].—The Amulet.
The puzzle was to place your pencil on the A at the top of the amulet and count in how many different ways you could trace out the word "Abracadabra" downwards, always passing from a letter to an adjoining one.
