und his head at arm's length. The impulse with which he
threw the vessel from him, being a centrifugal force, the retention of his
arm operating as a centripetal power, and the bucket, which was a
substitute for the earth, describing a circular orbit round about the
globular head and ruby visage of Professor Von Poddingcoft, which formed
no bad representation of the sun. All of these particulars were duly
explained to the class of gaping students around him. He apprised them,
moreover, that the same principle of gravitation which retained the water
in the bucket restrains the ocean from flying from the earth in its rapid
revolutions; and he farther informed them that should the motion of the
earth be suddenly checked, it would incontinently fall into the sun,
through the centripetal force of gravitation: a most ruinous event to this
planet, and one which would also obscure, though it most probably would
not extinguish, the solar luminary. An unlucky stripling, one of those
vagrant geniuses who seem sent into the world merely to annoy worthy men
of the puddinghead order, desirous of ascertaining the correctness of the
experiment, suddenly arrested the arm of the professor just at the moment
that the bucket was in its zenith, which immediately descended with
astonishing precision upon the philosophic head of the instructor of
youth. A hollow sound, and a red-hot hiss, attended the contact; but the
theory was in the amplest manner illustrated, for the unfortunate bucket
perished in the conflict; but the blazing countenance of Professor Von
Poddingcoft emerged from amidst the waters, glowing fiercer than ever with
unutterable indignation, whereby the students were marvelously edified,
and departed considerably wiser than before.

It is a mortifying circumstance, which greatly perplexes many a
painstaking philosopher, that nature often refuses to second his most
profound and elaborate efforts; so that often after having invented one
of the most ingenious and natural theories imaginable, she will have the
perverseness to act directly in the teeth of his system, and flatly
contradict his most favorite positions. This is a manifest and unmerited
grievance, since it throws the censure of the vulgar and unlearned
entirely upon the philosopher; whereas the fault is not to be ascribed to
his theory, which is unquestionably correct, but to the waywardness of
Dame Nature, who, with the proverbial fickleness of her sex, is
continually