or there is no way of teaching a truth comparable to
opposition. The last I heard of it was in lectures at Plymouth, in
October 1864. Since this time a prospectus has been issued of a work
entitled "The Earth not a Globe;" but whether it has been published I do
not know.'

The book was published soon after the above was written, and De Morgan
gives the following quaint account of it: 'August 28, 1865. The zetetic
astronomy has come into my hands. When in 1851 I went to see the Great
Exhibition I heard an organ played by a performer who seemed very
desirous of exhibiting one particular stop. "What do you think of that
stop?" I was asked. "That depends on the name of it," said I "Oh! what
can the name of it have to do with the sound? 'that which we call a
rose,' etc." "The name has everything to do with it: if it be a flute
stop I think it very harsh; but if it be a railway-whistle stop, I think
it very sweet." So as to this book: if it be childish, it is clever; if
it be mannish, it is unusually foolish. The flat earth floating
tremulously on the sea; the sun moving always over the flat, giving day
when near enough, and night when too far off; the self-luminous moon,
with a semi-transparent invisible moon created to give her an eclipse
now and then; the new law of perspective, by which the vanishing of the
hull before the masts, usually thought to prove the earth globular,
really proves it flat;--all these and other things are well fitted to
form exercises for a person who is learning the elements of astronomy.
The manner in which the sun dips into the sea, especially in tropical
climates, upsets the whole. Mungo Park, I think, gives an African
hypothesis which explains phenomena better than this. The sun dips into
the Western ocean, and the people there cut him in pieces, fry him in a
pan, and then join him together again; take him round the under way, and
set him up in the East. I hope this book will be read, and that many
will be puzzled by it; for there are many whose notions of astronomy
deserve no better fate. There is no subject on which there is so little
accurate conception as on that of the motions of the heavenly
bodies.[51] The author, though confident in the extreme, neither
impeaches the honesty of those whose opinion he assails, nor allots them
any future inconvenience: in these points he is worthy to live on a
globe and to rotate in twenty-four hours.'

I chanced to reside near Plymouth when Mr. Rowbotha