he year 451 was pictured
in a veritable tempest of gyrations, leaps, and somersaults. The subtle
and hidden meanings of the text called for all the resources of the
Professor's eloquent legs, arms, shoulders, lips, and eyes. A certain
obscure passage in the life of Attila the Hun, which had long been a
puzzle to students of Gibbon, was for the first time made clear to the
average man when Professor Jones, standing on one foot, whirled around
rapidly in one direction for five minutes, and then, instantly reversing
himself, spun around for ten minutes in the opposite direction.
In the ballroom of the Hotel Taftoftia, during Christmas week, William
K. Spriggs, Ph.D., held a number of fashionable audiences spellbound
with his marvellously lucid dances in Euclid and Algebra up to
Quadratics. Perhaps the very acme of the Terpsichorean art was attained
in the masterly fluency of body and limbs with which Mr. Spriggs
demonstrated that the sum of the angles in any triangle is equal
to two right angles. In Pittsburg Mr. Spriggs is said to have moved
an audience to tears when, by an original combination of the Virginia
reel, the two-step, and the Navajo snake dance, he showed that if
_x^{2}+y^{2}_ = 25 and _x^{2}-y^{2}_ = 25, _x_ equals 5 and _y_ equals
zero. All the pride and selfishness of _x_, all the despair of _y_, were
mirrored in the dancer's play of features. The spectators could not help
pondering over the seeming law of injustice that rules the world. Why
should _x_ be everything in the equations and _y_ nothing? Why should
_y_'s nonentity be used even to set off the all importance of _x_? But
they found no answer. On the other hand, a large number of college
freshmen who had failed on their entrance mathematics found no
difficulty in passing off their conditions after attending three
performances of Mr. Spriggs's dance.
We can give only the briefest mention to an entire school of experts and
scientists who helped to make the season of 1912-13 memorable in the
annals of the greatest of all arts. For a solitary illustration we may
take Mr. Boom, who, at the annual meeting of the American Zooelogical
Association, danced his monumental two-volume work entitled, "The
Variations of the Alimentary Canal in the Frogs and Toads." This dance
was subsequently repeated before several crowned heads of Europe.
An event of more than ordinary interest was the debate between Senators
Green and Hammond on the question whether the Un
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