nd 5/8 to travel the next four, and if
its rate of progress continued to diminish in the same ratio, how
long would it take it to go fifteen hundred million miles?"

I don't know.

"AMBITIOUS LEARNER," Oakland.--Yes; you are right America was not
discovered by Alexander Selkirk.

"DISCARDED LOVER."--"I loved, and still love, the beautiful Edwitha
Howard, and intended to marry her. Yet, during my temporary absence
at Benicia, last week, alas! she married Jones. Is my happiness to
be thus blasted for life? Have I no redress?"

Of course you have. All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side.
The intention and not the act constitutes crime--in other words,
constitutes the deed. If you call your bosom friend a fool, and intend
it for an insult, it is an insult; but if you do it playfully, and
meaning no insult, it is not an insult. If you discharge a pistol
accidentally, and kill a man, you can go free, for you have done no
murder; but if you try to kill a man, and manifestly intend to kill him,
but fail utterly to do it, the law still holds that the intention
constituted the crime, and you are guilty of murder. Ergo, if you had
married Edwitha accidentally, and without really intending to do it, you
would not actually be married to her at all, because the act of marriage
could not be complete without the intention. And ergo, in the strict
spirit of the law, since you deliberately intended to marry Edwitha, and
didn't do it, you are married to her all the same--because, as I said
before, the intention constitutes the crime. It is as clear as day that
Edwitha is your wife, and your redress lies in taking a club and
mutilating Jones with it as much as you can. Any man has a right to
protect his own wife from the advances of other men. But you have
another alternative--you were married to Edwitha first, because of your
deliberate intention, and now you can prosecute her for bigamy, in
subsequently marrying Jones. But there is another phase in this
complicated case: You intended to marry Edwitha, and consequently,
according to law, she is your wife--there is no getting around that; but
she didn't marry you, and if she never intended to marry you, you are not
her husband, of course. Ergo, in marrying Jones, she was guilty of
bigamy, because she was the wife of another man at the time; which is all
very well as far as it goes--but then, don't you see, she had no other
husb