if they have not been a thousand. Nobody knows how
they swarm, except those to whom they naturally resort. They are in all
ranks and occupations, of all ages and characters. They are very earnest
people, and their purpose is _bona fide_ the dissemination of their
paradoxes. A great many--the mass, indeed--are illiterate, and a great many
waste their means, and are in or approaching penury. But I must say that
never, in any one instance, has the quadrature of the circle, or the like,
been made a pretext for begging; even to be asked to purchase a book is of
the very rarest occurrence--it has happened, and that is all.

These discoverers despise one another: if there were the concert among them
which there is among foreign mendicants, a man who admitted one to a
conference would be plagued to death. I once gave something to a very
genteel French applicant, who overtook me in the street, at my own door,
saying he had picked up my handkerchief: whether he picked it up in my
pocket for an introduction, I know not. {9} But that day week came another
Frenchman to my house, and that day fortnight a French lady; both failed,
and I had no more trouble. The same thing happened with Poles. It is not so
with circle-squarers, etc.: they know nothing of each other. Some will read
this list, and will say I am right enough, generally speaking, but that
there _is_ an exception, if I could but see it.

I do not mean, by my confession of the manner in which I have sinned
against the twenty-four hours, to hold myself out as accessible to personal
explanation of new plans. Quite the contrary: I consider myself as having
made my report, and being discharged from further attendance on the
subject. I will not, from henceforward, talk to any squarer of the circle,
trisector of the angle, duplicator of the cube, constructor of perpetual
motion, subverter of gravitation, stagnator of the earth, builder of the
universe, etc. I will receive any writings or books which require no
answer, and read them when I please: I will certainly preserve them--this
list may be enlarged at some future time.

There are three subjects which I have hardly anything upon; astrology,
mechanism, and the infallible way of winning at play. I have never cared to
preserve astrology. The mechanists make models, and not books. The
infallible winners--though I have seen a few--think their secret too
valuable, and prefer _mutare quadrata rotundis_--to turn dice into coin--at
th