length plus the breadth. That is 60.25 × 2 = 120½. His first assertion is only true of a square garden. His second is irrelevant, since 60.25 is not the square-root of 3,630! Nay, Bob, this will not do! Tympanum says that, by extracting the square-root of 3,630, we get 60 yards with a remainder of 3060, or half-a-yard, which we add so as to make the oblong 60 × 60½, This is very terrible: but worse remains behind. Tympanum proceeds thus:—"But why should there be the half-yard at all? Because without it there would be no space at all for flowers. By means of it, we find reserved in the very centre a small plot of ground, two yards long by half-a-yard wide, the only space not occupied by walk." But Balbus expressly said that the walk "used up the whole of the area." Oh, Tympanum! My tympa is exhausted: my brain is num! I can say no more.
Hecla indulges, again and again, in that most fatal of all habits in computation—the making two mistakes which cancel each other. She takes x as the width of the garden, in yards, and x + ½ as its length, and makes her first "coil" the sum of x - ½, x - ½, x - 1, x - 1, i.e. 4 x - 3: but the fourth term should be x - 1½, so that her first coil is ½ a yard too long. Her second coil is the sum of x - 2½, x - 2½, x - 3, x - 3: here the first term should be x - 2 and the last x - 3½: these two
