urse: I should no more believe that a flat earth was a man's only
paradox, than I should that Dutens,[186] the editor of Leibnitz, was
eccentric only in supplying a tooth which he had lost by one which he found
in an Italian tomb, and fully believed that it had once belonged to Scipio
Africanus, whose family vault was discovered, it is supposed, in 1780. Mr.
Archer is of note as {91} the suggester of the perforated border of the
postage-stamps, and, I think, of the way of doing it; for this he got
4000l. reward. He was a civil engineer.

(_August 28, 1865._) The _Zetetic Astronomy_ has come into my hands. When,
in 1851, I went to see the Great Exhibition, I heard an organ played by a
performer who seemed very desirous to exhibit one particular stop. "What do
you think of that stop?" I was asked.--"That depends on the name of it,"
said I.--"Oh! what can the name have to do with the sound? 'that which we
call a rose,' etc."--"The name has everything to do with it: if it be a
flute-stop, I think it very harsh; but if it be a railway-whistle-stop, I
think it very sweet." So as to this book: if it be childish, it is clever;
if it be mannish, it is unusually foolish. The flat earth, floating
tremulously on the sea; the sun moving always over the flat, giving day
when near enough, and night when too far off; the self-luminous moon, with
a semi-transparent invisible moon, created to give her an eclipse now and
then; the new law of perspective, by which the vanishing of the hull before
the masts, usually thought to prove the earth globular, really proves it
flat;--all these and other things are well fitted to form exercises for a
person who is learning the elements of astronomy. The manner in which the
sun dips into the sea, especially in tropical climates, upsets the whole.
Mungo Park,[187] I think, gives an African hypothesis which explains
phenomena better than this. The sun dips into the western ocean, and the
people there cut him in pieces, fry him in a pan, and then join him
together again, take him round the underway, and set him up in the east. I
hope this book will be read, and that many will be puzzled by it: for there
are many whose notions of astronomy deserve no better fate. There is no
subject on which there is so little {92} accurate conception as that of the
motions of the heavenly bodies. The author, though confident in the
extreme, neither impeaches the honesty of those whose opinions he assails,
nor allots them