De Morgan's correspondents. But the name most likely to
arrest us is that of Giordano Bruno, the same philosopher, heretic,
and martyr whose statue has recently been erected in Rome, to the great
horror of the Pope and his prelates in the Old World and in the New. De
Morgan's pithy account of him will interest the company: "Giordano Bruno
was all paradox. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes,
an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be
easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about
1550, and was roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the
maintenance and defence of the Holy Church, and the rights and liberties
of the same."

Number Seven could not contain himself when the reading had reached this
point. He rose from his chair, and tinkled his spoon against the side of
his teacup. It may have been a fancy, but I thought it returned a sound
which Mr. Richard Briggs would have recognized as implying an organic
defect. But Number Seven did not seem to notice it, or, if he did, to
mind it.

"Why did n't we all have a chance to help erect that statue?" he cried.
"A murdered heretic at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a hero
of knowledge in the nineteenth,--I drink to the memory of the roasted
crank, Giordano Bruno!"

Number Seven lifted his teacup to his lips, and most of us followed his
example.

After this outburst of emotion and eloquence had subsided, and the
teaspoons lay quietly in their saucers, I went on with my extract from
the book I had in hand.

I think, I said, that the passage which follows will be new and
instructive to most of the company. De Morgan's interpretation of the
cabalistic sentence, made up as you will find it, is about as ingenious
a piece of fanciful exposition as you will be likely to meet with
anywhere in any book, new or old. I am the more willing to mention it
as it suggests a puzzle which some of the company may like to work upon.
Observe the character and position of the two distinguished philosophers
who did not think their time thrown away in laboring at this seemingly
puerile task.

"There is a kind of Cabbala Alphabetica which the investigators of
the numerals in words would do well to take up; it is the formation of
sentences which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only
once. No one has done it with v and j treated as consonants; but you
and I can do it. Dr. Whewell and I amused ours