put hors de combat—which should have been caché—by pebbles from a sling. If Goliath had crept into a snail-shell, David would have cracked the Philistine with his foot. There is something lke modesty in the implication that the crack-shell pebble has not yet taken effect; it might have been thought that the slinger would by this time have been singing—
And thrice [and one-eighth] I slew the slain.
But he promises to give the public his nut-cracker if I do not, before the Budget is concluded, 'unravel' the paradox, which is the mathematico-geometrical nut he has given me to, crack. Mr. Smith is a crack man: he will crack his own nut; he will crack my shell; in the mean time he cracks himself up. Heaven send he do not crack himself into lateral contiguity with himself.
On June 27 I received a letter, in the handwriting of Mr. James Smith, signed Nauticus. I have ascertained that one of the letters to the Athenæum signed Nauticus is in the same handwriting. I make a few extracts:—
'…The important question at issue has been treated by a brace of mathematical birds with too much levity. It may be said, however, that sarcasm and ridicule sometimes succeed, where reason fails…Such a course is not well suited to a discussion…For this reason I shall for the future [this implies there has been a past, so that Nauticus is not before me for the first time] endeavour to confine myself to dry reasoning from incontrovertible premisses…It appears to me that so far as his theory is concerned he comes off unscathed. You might have found "a hole in Smith's circle" (have you seen a pamphlet bearing this title? [I never heard of it until now]), but after all it is quite possible the hole may have been left by design, for the purpose of entrapping the unwary.'
[On the publication of the above, the author of the pamphlet obligingly forwarded a copy to me of 'A Hole in Smith's Circle— by a Cantab: Longman and Co., 1859,' (pp. 15). 'It is pity to lose any fun we can get out of the affair, says my almamaternal brother: to which I add that in such a case warning without joke is worse than none at all, as giving a false idea of the nature of the danger. The Cantab takes some absurdities on which I have not dwelt: but there are enough to afford a Cantab from every college his own separate hunting ground.]
Does this hint that his mode of proof, namely, assuming the thing to be proved, was a design to entrap the unwary? if so, it bangs Banagher. Was his confounding two mean proportionals
