led very naturally to try and discover whether a gravitating body really
could revolve; and I became convinced it could not, before I had ever
presumed to look into the demonstrations of the _Principia_."

This is enough against the book, without a word from me: I insert it only
to show those who know the subject what manner of writer Mr. Reddie is. It
is clear that "presumed" is a slip of the pen; it should have been
_condescended_.

Mr. Reddie represents me as dreaming over paltry paradoxes. He is right;
many of my paradoxes are paltry: he is wrong; I am wide awake to them. A
single moth, beetle, or butterfly, may be a paltry thing; but when a
cabinet is arranged by genus and species, we then begin to admire the {352}
infinite variety of a system constructed on a wonderful sameness of leading
characteristics. And why should paradoxes be denied that collective
importance, paltry as many of them may individually be, which is accorded
to moths, beetles, or butterflies? Mr. Reddie himself sees that "there is a
method in" my "mode of dealing with paradoxes." I hope I have atoned for
the scantiness of my former article, and put the demonstrated impossibility
of gravitation on that level with Hubongramillposanfy arithmetic and
inhabited atoms which the demonstrator--not quite without reason--claims
for it.

In the Introduction to a collected edition of the three works, Mr. Reddie
describes his _Mechanism of the Heavens_, from which I have just quoted,
as--

"a public challenge offered to the British Association and the
mathematicians at Cambridge, in August, 1862, calling upon them to point to
a single demonstration in the _Principia_ or elsewhere, which even attempts
to prove that Universal Gravitation is possible, or to show that a
gravitating body could possibly revolve about a center of attraction. The
challenge was not accepted, and never will be. No such demonstration
exists. And the public must judge for themselves as to the character of a
so-called "certain science," which thus shrinks from rigid examination, and
dares not defend itself when publicly attacked: also of the character of
its teachers, who can be content to remain dumb under such circumstances."

ON PARADOXERS IN GENERAL.

The above is the commonplace talk of the class, of which I proceed to speak
without more application to this paradoxer than to that. It reminds one of
the funny young rascals who used, in times not yet quite forgotte