and, when the number is very great indeed, say for example
three or four hundred, it is extremely difficult for the most delicate
touch to feel any polygonal angles. Let me say rather it WOULD be
difficult: for, as I have shown above, Recognition by Feeling is
unknown among the highest society, and to FEEL a Circle would be
considered a most audacious insult. This habit of abstention from
Feeling in the best society enables a Circle the more easily to sustain
the veil of mystery in which, from his earliest years, he is wont to
enwrap the exact nature of his Perimeter or Circumference. Three feet
being the average Perimeter it follows that, in a Polygon of three
hundred sides each side will be no more than the hundredth part of a
foot in length, or little more than the tenth part of an inch; and in a
Polygon of six or seven hundred sides the sides are little larger than
the diameter of a Spaceland pin-head. It is always assumed, by
courtesy, that the Chief Circle for the time being has ten thousand
sides.

The ascent of the posterity of the Circles in the social scale is not
restricted, as it is among the lower Regular classes, by the Law of
Nature which limits the increase of sides to one in each generation.
If it were so, the number of sides in the Circle would be a mere
question of pedigree and arithmetic, and the four hundred and
ninety-seventh descendant of an Equilateral Triangle would necessarily
be a polygon with five hundred sides. But this is not the case.
Nature's Law prescribes two antagonistic decrees affecting Circular
propagation; first, that as the race climbs higher in the scale of
development, so development shall proceed at an accelerated pace;
second, that in the same proportion, the race shall become less
fertile. Consequently in the home of a Polygon of four or five hundred
sides it is rare to find a son; more than one is never seen. On the
other hand the son of a five-hundred-sided Polygon has been known to
possess five hundred and fifty, or even six hundred sides.

Art also steps in to help the process of higher Evolution. Our
physicians have discovered that the small and tender sides of an infant
Polygon of the higher class can be fractured, and his whole frame
re-set, with such exactness that a Polygon of two or three hundred
sides sometimes--by no means always, for the process is attended with
serious risk--but sometimes overleaps two or three hundred generations,
and as it were doub