my office one morning when a
modest-looking gentleman opened the door and looked in.

"I would like to see Professor Newcomb."

"Well, here he is."

"You Professor Newcomb?"

"Yes."

"Professor, I have called to tell you that I don't believe in Sir
Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation!"

"Don't believe in gravitation! Suppose you jump out of that window
and see whether there is any gravitation or not."

"But I don't mean that. I mean"--

"But that is all there is in the theory of gravitation; if you jump
out of the window you'll fall to the ground."

"I don't mean that. What I mean is I don't believe in the Newtonian
theory that gravitation goes up to the moon. It does n't extend
above the air."

"Have you ever been up there to see?"

There was an embarrassing pause, during which the visitor began to
look a little sheepish.

"N-no-o," he at length replied.

"Well, I have n't been there either, and until one of us can get up
there to try the experiment, I don't believe we shall ever agree on
the subject."

He took his leave without another word.

The idea that the facts of nature are to be brought out by
observation is one which is singularly foreign not only to people
of this class, but even to many sensible men. When the great comet
of 1882 was discovered in the neighborhood of the sun, the fact was
telegraphed that it might be seen with the naked eye, even in the
sun's neighborhood. A news reporter came to my office with this
statement, and wanted to know if it was really true that a comet
could be seen with the naked eye right alongside the sun.

"I don't know," I replied; "suppose you go out and look for yourself;
that is the best way to settle the question."

The idea seemed to him to be equally amusing and strange, and on
the basis of that and a few other insipid remarks, he got up an
interview for the "National Republican" of about a column in length.

I think there still exists somewhere in the Northwest a communistic
society presided over by a genius whose official name is Koresh,
and of which the religious creed has quite a scientific turn.
Its fundamental doctrine is that the surface of the earth on which
we live is the inside of a hollow sphere, and therefore concave,
instead of convex, as generally supposed. The oddest feature of
the doctrine is that Koresh professes to have proved it by a method
which, so far as the geometry of it goes, is more rigorous than any
other that