The spider in the dockyard, whose thread was drawn from her by a revolving capstan 1 foot in diameter, until 73 feet of it were paid out, after walking for a mile round and round the capstan at the end of the stretched thread in an effort to unwind it all, had, when she stopped in her spiral course, 49 more feet to walk to complete her task.
59.
The mountebank at a fair, who offered to return any stake a hundredfold to anyone who could turn up all the sequence in twenty throws of dice marked each on one face only with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, should in fairness have engaged to return 2332 times the money; for of the 46,656 possible combinations of the faces of the dice, only one can give the six marked faces uppermost. Thus the chance of throwing them all at one throw is expressed by 1⁄46656, and in twenty throws by about 1⁄2332.
60.
If 90 groats (each = 4d.) feed twenty cats for three weeks, and five cats consume as much as three dogs, seventy-two hounds can be fed for £39 in a period of ninety-one days.
61.
When equal wine-glasses, a half and a third full of wine, are filled up with water, and their contents are mixed, and one wine-glass is filled with the mixture, it contains 5⁄12 wine and 7⁄12 water.