g was wrong in the accepted system--for a six-mile straight-edge
along water would be as severe a blow to the belief in a round earth, as
a straight line on the sea-surface from Queenstown to New York. Another
curious experiment adorns his little book, which, if it could be
repeated successfully before a dozen trustworthy witnesses, would rather
astonish men of science. Having, he says, by certain
reasoning--altogether erroneous, but that is a detail--convinced himself
that, on the accepted theory, a bullet fired vertically upwards ought to
fall far to the west of the place whence it was fired, he carefully
fixed an air-gun in a vertical position, and fired forty bullets
vertically upwards. All these fell close to the gun--which is not
surprising, though it must have made such an experiment rather
dangerous; but two fell back into the barrel itself--which certainly was
very surprising indeed. One might fairly challenge the most experienced
gunner in the world to achieve one such vertical shot in a thousand
trials; two in forty bordered on the miraculous.

The earth-flatteners I have been speaking of claim, as one of their
objects, the defence of Scripture. But some of the earth-flatteners of
the last generation (or a little farther back) took quite another view
of the matter. For instance, Sir Richard Phillips, a more vehement
earth-flattener than Parallax, was so little interested in defending
the Scriptures, that in 1793 he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment
for selling a book regarded as atheistic. In 1836 he attempted the
conversion of Professor De Morgan, opening the correspondence with the
remark that he had 'an inveterate abhorrence of all the pretended wisdom
of philosophy derived from the monks and doctors of the Middle Ages, and
not less those of higher name who merely sought to make the monkish
philosophy more plausible, or so to disguise it as to mystify the mob of
small thinkers.' He seems himself to have succeeded in mystifying many
of those whom he intended to convert. Admiral Smyth gives the following
account of an interview he had with Phillips: 'This pseudo-mathematical
knight once called upon me at Bedford, without any previous
acquaintance, to discuss "those errors of Newton, which he almost
blushed to name," and which were inserted in the "Principia" to "puzzle
the vulgar." He sneered with sovereign contempt at the "Trinity of
Gravitating Force, Projectile Force, and Void Space," and proved that