reproachable name.

Certainly it would be the most sensational communication that had ever
appeared in a newspaper. In a day or two, granted always that the
_Times_ had no doubts as to his sanity and printed the letter, the whole
Press would be ablaze with it; Wimbledon would be besieged by reporters
eager to see miracles; and then they would go away and write lurid
articles, some about the miracles, if they saw them, and some about an
absolutely new form of conjuring that he had invented. Then the
scientific Press would take it up, and a very merry battle of wits would
begin. He smiled gravely as he thought of the inkshed that would come to
pass in a _combat a l'outrance_ between the Three Dimensionists and the
Four Dimensionists, and how the distinguished scientists on each side
would hurl their ponderous thunderbolts of wisdom against each other.

Then there would be the religious folk to deal with, for naturally no
theologian of any enterprise or self-respect could see a fight like that
going on without taking a hand in it. The Churches, of course, had a
monopoly of miracles, or at least the traditions of them. The Christian
Scientists, blatantly, claimed to work them now, but their subjects died
with disgusting regularity. So he quickly came to the conclusion that,
if he were once to state in plain English that he could accomplish the
seemingly impossible; that he, a mere mortal, could make himself
independent of the ordinary conditions of time and space and break with
impunity all the laws which govern the physical universe, he would
simply make himself the centre of a vortex of frenzied disputation which
would shake the social, religious, and scientific worlds to their
foundations, and that would certainly not be a pleasant position for an
eminent and respected scientist, who was already a certain number of
years past middle age--to say nothing of the very real harm that might
be done.

Of course, he could settle all the disputes instantly, and dazzle the
whole world into the bargain by simply delivering a lecture, say, before
the Royal Society, on the existence of a world of four dimensions, and
then proving by ocular demonstration that it does exist; but what would
happen then? Simply intellectual anarchy.

Every belief that man had held for ages would be negatived. For
instance, if there is one dogma to which humanity has clung with
unanimous consistency, it is to the dogma that two and two make four.
What