o an ordinary schoolboy; Whewell,[202] as we shall see,
gave him the means of seeing himself wrong, even more easily than by
Hamilton's method. Nothing would do; it was small kick and silly fling at
all; and he exposed his conceit by alleging that he, James Smith, had
placed Whewell in the stocks. He will therefore be universally pronounced a
proper object of the severest literary punishment: but the opinion of all
who can put two propositions together will be that of the many strokes I
have given, the hardest and most telling are my republications of his own
attempts to reason.

He will come out of my hands in the position he ought {105} to hold, the
Supreme Pontiff of cyclometers, the vicegerent of St. Vitus upon earth, the
Mamamouchi of burlesque on inference. I begin with a review of him which
appeared in the _Athenaeum_ of May 11, 1861. Mr. Smith says I wrote it: this
I neither affirm nor deny; to do either would be a sin against the
editorial system elsewhere described. Many persons tell me they know me by
my style; let them form a guess: I can only say that many have declared as
above while fastening on me something which I had never seen nor heard of.

The Quadrature of the Circle: Correspondence between an Eminent
Mathematician and James Smith, Esq. (Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd; London,
Simpkin, Marshall & Co.)

"A few weeks ago we were in perpetual motion. We did not then suppose that
anything would tempt us on a circle-squaring expedition: but the
circumstances of the book above named have a peculiarity which induces us
to give it a few words.

"Mr. James Smith, a gentleman residing near Liverpool, was some years ago
seized with the _morbus cyclometricus_.[203] The symptoms soon took a
defined form: his circumference shrank into exactly 3-1/8 times his
diameter, instead of close to 3-16/113, which the mathematician knows to be
so near to truth that the error is hardly at the rate of a foot in 2,000
miles. This shrinking of the circumference remained until it became
absolutely necessary that it should be examined by the British Association.
This body, which as Mr. James Smith found to his sorrow, has some interest
in 'jealously guarding the mysteries of their profession,' refused at first
to entertain the question. On this Mr. Smith changed his 'tactics' and the
name of his paper, and smuggled in the subject under the form of 'The
Relations of a Circle inscribed in a Square'! The paper was thus