thrilling adventure, would pretend
to fall fast asleep, to our great dismay." ...

"Many of Lewis Carroll's friendships with children began in a railway
carriage. Once when he was traveling, a lady, whose little daughter
had been reading _Alice_, startled him by exclaiming: 'Isn't it sad
about poor Mr. Lewis Carroll? He's gone mad, you know.... I have it
on the best authority.'"

Lewis Carroll, or rather Mr. Dodgson, did not wish his acquaintances
to speak of him as the author of _Alice_. In his every-day work he
wanted to be known as the serious mathematician. He was conservative
in his ideas and did not look with favor upon the movement to
overthrow Euclid. In 1870 he published a book entitled _Euclid and his
Modern Rivals_. The London _Spectator_ speaks of this as probably the
most humorous contribution ever devoted to the subject of mathematics.
In an academical discussion held at Oxford he once published three
rules to be followed in debate. This is one of the three: "Let it be
granted that any one may speak at any length on a subject at any
distance from that subject."

XLII

ABOUT DARWIN

When a prominent literary journal at the close of the last century
asked a number of distinguished Americans and Englishmen to name the
ten most influential books of the century, it was interesting to note
that Darwin's _Origin of Species_ received more frequent mention than
any other book. Five years after Charles Darwin had been buried (he
was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey in 1882), his son published the
_Life and Letters of Darwin_, which included an autobiographical
chapter. From this work we can gather enough to show some aspects of
this remarkable man.

Men of genius are often in childhood very imaginative. It is sometimes
pretty difficult to distinguish between playful imagination and lying.
Let us give Darwin the benefit of the doubt in this instance:

"One little event during this year (1817) has fixed itself very firmly
in my mind, and I hope that it has done so from my conscience having
been afterwards sorely troubled by it; it is curious as showing that
apparently I was interested at this early age in the variability of
plants! I told another little boy (I believe it was Leighton, who
afterwards became a well-known lichenologist and botanist), that I
could produce variously colored polyanthuses and primroses by watering
them with certain colored fluids, which was of course a monstrous
fable, an