fectly uniform." all irregularities
being, I suppose, optical delusions. Mr. Von Gumpach is a learned man; what
else, time must show.

SLANDER PARADOXES.

Perpetuum Mobile: or Search for self-motive Power. By Henry
Dircks.[243] London, 1861, 8vo.

A useful collection on the history of the attempts at perpetual motion,
that is, at obtaining the consequences of power without any power to
produce them. September 7, 1863, a correspondent of the _Times_ gave an
anecdote of George Stephenson,[244] which he obtained from Robert
Stephenson.[245] A perpetual motionist wanted to explain his method; to
which George replied--"Sir! I shall believe it when I see you take yourself
up by the waistband, and carry yourself about the room." Never was the
problem better stated.

There is a paradox of which I ought to give a specimen, I mean the
_slander-paradox_; the case of a person who takes it into his head, upon
evidence furnished entirely by the workings of his own thoughts, that some
other person has committed a foul act of which the world at large would no
more suppose him guilty than they would suppose that the earth is a flat
bordered by ice. If I were to determine on giving cases in which the
self-deluded person imagines {139} a conspiracy against _himself_, there
would be no end of choices. Many of the grosser cases are found at last to
be accompanied by mental disorder, and it is difficult to avoid referring
the whole class to something different from simple misuse of the reasoning
power. The first instance is one which puts in a strong light the state of
things in which we live, brought about by our glorious freedom of thought,
speech, and writing. The Government treated it with neglect, the press with
silent contempt, and I will answer for it many of my readers now hear of it
for the first time, when it comes to be enrolled among circle-squarers and
earth-stoppers, where, as the old philosopher said, it will not gravitate,
being _in proprio loco_.[246]

1862. On new year's day, 1862, when the nation was in the full tide of
sympathy with the Queen, and regret for its own loss, a paper called the
_Free Press_ published a number devoted to the consideration of the causes
of the death of the Prince Consort. It is so rambling and inconsecutive
that it takes more than one reading to understand it. It is against the
_Times_ newspaper. First, the following insinuation:

"To the legal mind, the part of [the part take