dious grouping. The whole science and art of
Sight Recognition would at once perish; Feeling, so far as it is an
art, would not long survive; intercourse would become perilous or
impossible; there would be an end to all confidence, all forethought;
no one would be safe in making the most simple social arrangements; in
a word, civilization would relapse into barbarism.

Am I going too fast to carry my Readers with me to these obvious
conclusions? Surely a moment's reflection, and a single instance from
common life, must convince every one that our whole social system is
based upon Regularity, or Equality of Angles. You meet, for example,
two or three Tradesmen in the street, whom you recognize at once to be
Tradesmen by a glance at their angles and rapidly bedimmed sides, and
you ask them to step into your house to lunch. This you do at present
with perfect confidence, because everyone knows to an inch or two the
area occupied by an adult Triangle: but imagine that your Tradesman
drags behind his regular and respectable vertex, a parallelogram of
twelve or thirteen inches in diagonal:--what are you to do with such a
monster sticking fast in your house door?

But I am insulting the intelligence of my Readers by accumulating
details which must be patent to everyone who enjoys the advantages of a
Residence in Spaceland. Obviously the measurements of a single angle
would no longer be sufficient under such portentous circumstances;
one's whole life would be taken up in feeling or surveying the
perimeter of one's acquaintances. Already the difficulties of avoiding
a collision in a crowd are enough to tax the sagacity of even a
well-educated Square; but if no one could calculate the Regularity of a
single figure in the company, all would be chaos and confusion, and the
slightest panic would cause serious injuries, or--if there happened to
be any Women or Soldiers present--perhaps considerable loss of life.

Expediency therefore concurs with Nature in stamping the seal of its
approval upon Regularity of conformation: nor has the Law been
backward in seconding their efforts. "Irregularity of Figure" means
with us the same as, or more than, a combination of moral obliquity and
criminality with you, and is treated accordingly. There are not
wanting, it is true, some promulgators of paradoxes who maintain that
there is no necessary connection between geometrical and moral
Irregularity. "The Irregular", they say, "is fro