put _hors de combat_--which should have been _cache_[221]--by pebbles from
a sling. If Goliath had crept into a snail-shell, David would have cracked
the Philistine with his foot. There is something like modesty in the
implication that the crack-shell pebble has not yet taken effect; it might
have been thought that the slinger would by this time have been singing--

"And thrice [and one-eighth] I routed all my foes,
And thrice [and one-eighth] I slew the slain."

But he promises to give the public his nut-cracker if I do not, before the
Budget is concluded, "unravel" the paradox, which is the
mathematico-geometrical nut he has given me to crack. Mr. Smith is a crack
man: he will crack his own nut; he will crack my shell; in the mean time he
cracks himself up. Heaven send he do not crack himself into lateral
contiguity with himself.

On June 27 I received a letter, in the handwriting of Mr. James Smith,
signed Nauticus. I have ascertained {126} that one of the letters to the
_Athenaeum_ signed Nauticus is in the same handwriting. I make a few
extracts:

"... The important question at issue has been treated by a brace of
mathematical birds with too much levity. It may be said, however, that
sarcasm and ridicule sometimes succeed, where reason fails.... Such a
course is not well suited to a discussion.... For this reason I shall for
the future [this implies there has been a past, so that Nauticus is not
before me for the first time] endeavor to confine myself to dry reasoning
from incontrovertible premises.

... It appears to me that so far as his theory is concerned he comes off
unscathed. You might have found "a hole in Smith's circle" (have you seen a
pamphlet bearing this title? [I never heard of it until now]), but after
all it is quite possible the hole may have been left by design, for the
purpose of entrapping the unwary."

[On the publication of the above, the author of the pamphlet obligingly
forwarded a copy to me of _A Hole in Smith's Circle_--by a Cantab: Longman
and Co., 1859, (pp. 15). "It is pity to lose any fun we can get out of the
affair," says my almamaternal brother: to which I add that in such a case
warning without joke is worse than none at all, as giving a false idea of
the nature of the danger. The Cantab takes some absurdities on which I have
not dwelt: but there are enough to afford a Cantab from every college his
own separate hunting ground.]

Does this hint that his mode of proof,