spondence
served to throw quite a new light on the mental habitudes and ways of
thinking of the honest paradoxist. I believe that Professor De Morgan
hardly gave Mr. Reddie credit for the perfect honesty which he really
possessed. It may have been that a clear reasoner like De Morgan could
hardly (despite his wide experience) appreciate the confusion of mind
which is the normal characteristic of the paradoxist. But certainly the
very candid way in which Mr. Reddie admitted, in the correspondence
above named, that he had not known some facts and had misunderstood
others, afforded to my mind the most satisfactory proofs of his
straightforwardness.

It may be instructive to consider a few of those paradoxes of Mr.
Reddie's which Professor De Morgan found chief occasion to pulverise.

In a letter to the Astronomer-Royal Mr. Reddie announced that he was
about to write 'a paper intended to be hereafter published, elaborating
more minutely and discussing more rigidly than before the glaring
fallacies, dating from the time of Newton, relating to the motion of the
moon.' He proceeded to 'indicate the nature of the issues he intended to
raise.' He had discovered that the moon does not, as a matter of fact,
go round the earth at the rate of 2288 miles an hour, as astronomers
say, but follows an undulatory path round the sun at a rate varying
between 65,000 and 70,000 miles an hour; because, while the moon seems
to go round the earth, the latter is travelling onwards at the rate of
67,500 miles an hour round the sun. Of course he was quite right in his
facts, and quite wrong in his inferences; as the Astronomer-Royal
pointed out in a brief letter, closing with the remark that, 'as a very
closely occupied man,' Mr. Airy could 'not enter further into the
matter.' But further Mr. Reddie persisted in going, though he received
no more letters from Greenwich. His reply to Sir G. Airy contained, in
fact, matter enough for a small pamphlet.

Now here was certainly an amazing fact. A well-known astronomical
relation, which astronomers have over and over again described and
explained, is treated as though it were something which had throughout
all ages escaped attention. It is not here the failure to comprehend the
_rationale_ of a simple explanation which is startling, but the notion
that an obvious fact had been wholly overlooked.

Of like nature was the mistake which brought Mr. Reddie more especially
under Professor De Morgan's notic