"A Tub to the Whale" (Vol. viii., p. 220.).—In the Appendix B. to Sir James Macintosh's Life of Sir Thomas More is the following passage:
"The learned Mr. Douce has informed a friend of mine, that in Sebastian Munster's Cosmography there is a cut of a ship, to which a whale was coming too close for her safety; and of the sailors throwing a tub to the whale, evidently to play with. The practice of throwing a tub or barrel to a large fish, to divert the animal from gambols dangerous to a vessel, is also mentioned in an old prose translation of the Ship of Fools. These passages satisfactorily explain the common phrase of throwing a tub to a whale."
Sir James Macintosh conjectures that the phrase "the tale of a tub" (which was familiarly known in Sir Thomas More's time) had reference to the tub thrown to the whale.
C. H. Cooper.
Cambridge.
The Number Nine (Vol. viii., p. 149.).—The property of numbers enunciated and illustrated by Mr. Lammens resolves itself into two.
1. If from any number above nine be subtracted the number expressed by writing the same digits backwards, the remainder is divisible by nine.
2. If the number nine measure a given number, it measures the sum of its digits.
As the latter is proved in most elementary books on Algebra, I confine my proof to the former.
Let the number in question be—