on stools or ride on horses. They have to fall back on the "figurative" sense in which they allege them to be used in the books.
The books likewise contain sundry precepts of the same trite character, as: "Do not play with sharp-edged tools;" "Do not say or do anything to annoy others;" "Do not eat more than is good for you," and so on.
Once when a professor was vaunting the eminently transcendental character of these maxims and precepts, I ventured to remark that precisely the same maxims and precepts were to be met with in all terrestrial countries, and that I believed they were merely the expression of the common sense of all mankind. But he was thoroughly persuaded that mankind could not have found them out for themselves, and that they must first have been taught them by the ancient books. Without denying that they existed among terrestrial communities, he inferred from that very circumstance that at some remote period a transcendental professor had by some means or other been conveyed to a terrestrial country and had taught the inhabitants some of the wisdom of transcendental geography.
Some of the precepts of the ancient books are quite opposed to the habits of the Colymbians, and even to the doctrines inculcated by the professors. Thus, the books said, that if your enemy kicked you on one shin, you were to present him the other shin to be similarly kicked; and if a pickpocket emptied the contents of one of your pockets, you were at once to offer him the contents of the other pocket. Now, Colymbians of all classes, I observed, kicked those who kicked them, and punished those whom they detected stealing from them; and the professors themselves invariably acted in this way. When I called the attention of one of
