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Continually we hear of some new paradoxist who propounds as a novel doctrine the teaching that the atmosphere, and not the sun, is the cause of heat. The mistake was excusable in Swedenborg's time.
It so chanced that I had myself a good deal of correspondence with Mr. This correspondence served to throw quite a new light on the mental habitudes and ways of thinking of the honest paradoxist. I believe that Professor De Morgan hardly gave Mr. Reddie credit for the perfect honesty which he really possessed. But certainly the very candid way in which Mr.
One of the favourite subjects for paradox-forming is the accepted theory of the solar system. Our books on astronomy too often present this theory in such sort that it seems only a successor of Ptolemy's; and the impression is conveyed that, like Ptolemy's, it may be one day superseded by some other theory. This is quite enough for the paradoxist.
But, as Professor Tyndall has well remarked and the paradoxist should lay the lesson well to heart 'Newton's action in this matter was the normal action of the scientific mind.
The professional paradoxist went about with holes in his boots. Epigrams in hand, sickness at heart, and emptiness at stomach, he crawled through the town in search of a buyer. He offered a dozen of the choicest apothegms for a pair of hob-nailed boots, conjuring the cobbler like the veriest 'commercial' to note the superiority of the manufacture.
The latest paradoxist, misled by the incorrect term 'centrifugal force, proposes to 'modify, if not banish, the old-fashioned astronomy. What is called centrifugal force is in truth only inertia.
The paradoxist was abashed, the reader perhaps imagines. Not in the least. The planet's period must have been wrongly calculated by Leverrier that was all: the real period was less than half as long as Leverrier had supposed; and instead of having gone a certain number of times round since Lescarbault had seen it, Vulcan had gone twice as many times round and half once round again.
Louis, after leaving the Louisville paradoxist full time to parade his discovery, heartlessly pointed out that an exact number of revolutions of Vulcan after Lescarbault's March observation, must of necessity have brought the planet on that side of the sun on which the earth lies in March, so that to see Vulcan so placed on the sun's face in September was to see Vulcan through the sun, a very remarkable achievement indeed.
It has often seemed to me that a large part of the mischief for let it be remembered that the published errors of the paradoxist are indicative of much unpublished misapprehension arises from the undeserved contempt with which our books of astronomy too often treat the labours of Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, and others who advocated erroneous theories.
'I have received letters, he said, 'about the comets of the last few years, enough to make one's hair stand on end at the absurdity of the theories they propose, and at the ignorance of the commonest laws of optics, of motion, of heat, and of general physics, they betray in their writers. In the present instance, the correspondence showed that the paradoxist supposed the parabolic paths of some comets to be regarded by astronomers as analogous to the parabolic paths traversed by projectiles.
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