“You have brushed the bloom from the peach,
From the rose its soft hue.
What you’ve touched you may take,
Pretty waltzer, adieu.”
A Statesman as a Scientist
In the “Crotchet Castle,” published in 1831, is a merciless exposure of astonishing inaccuracies in some papers on scientific subjects, written by Lord Brougham for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Among the sarcastic thrusts is the following:
“I suppose the learned friend [Brougham] has written a sixpenny treatise on mechanics, and the rascals who robbed me have been reading it.
“Mr. Crotchet: Your house would have been very safe, doctor, if they had had no better science than the learned friend’s to work with.”
Lardner’s Mistaken Prediction
Few men have presented as prominent a target for irony as Dr. Dionysius Lardner, in view of his alleged statement, in 1836, that steam navigation for a voyage across the Atlantic was impracticable. What he said, according to the report of his address in the London Times, August 27, 1836, was that by collation of the amount of coal needed per horse-power, the speed obtainable, and the number of hours needed for the distance, no vessel could stow away enough coal to carry her through a voyage of three thousand miles, and that two thousand miles was the longest possible run. Brunel, the chief engineer of the Great Western Railway, pointed out an arithmetical error in the “demonstration” which vitiated the whole of it, and the learned doctor sat down suddenly without acknowledgment of his palpable error.