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He hated the whole business of squares and angles and parallelograms with such intensity that it made him mentally and morally sick. To his, as to some other minds, it was utter nonsense devised by a semi-lunatic for the bewilderment of mankind, and adopted by other lunatics as an appropriate form of torture of the young.
At dinner, while sipping his claret, Phillip delivered his opinion upon the agriculture of the district, which he had surveyed from his bicycle. It was incomplete, stationary, or retrograde. The form of the fields alone was an index to the character of the farmers who cultivated them. Not one had a regular shape. The fields were neither circles, squares, parallelograms, nor triangles.
On Lele, which is separated from Strong’s Island at the harbor by a very narrow channel, there is a “conical mountain surrounded by a wall some twenty feet high, and of enormous thickness.” The whole island appears to present “a series of Cyclopean inclosures and lines of great walls every where overgrown with forest.” Some of the inclosures are parallelograms 200 by 100 feet in extent; one is much larger.
The lodges of the Baron's followers were massed to one side, and as I whistled and swaggered my way past their great bark parallelograms, I saw preparations for war. The braves carried quivers, and were elaborately painted. Fires were burning, though the night was warm, and women nearly naked, and swinging kettles of red-hot coals, danced heavily around the blaze.
Castro, standing up unsteadily, growled, "We may do it yet! See, señor!" The blue gleam was much larger it flared smokily up towards the sky. I made out ghastly parallelograms of a ship's sails high above us, and at last many faces peering unseeingly over the rail in our direction. We all shouted together. I may say that it was thanks to me that we reached the ship.
It is one of the paradoxes of New York that the parts of the city where fashionable people live and spend their money are severely business-like in the treatment of streets, laying them out so as to form correct parallelograms and distinguishing them by numbers instead of names, as if terrified of letting imagination loose for a moment.
My earliest recollections are of a square courtyard surrounded by high walls and paved with blue and white pebbles in geometrical patterns circles, parallelograms, and lozenges. Two of these walls were blank, and had been coped with broken bottles; a third, similarly coped, had heavy folding doors of timber, leaden-grey in colour and studded with black bolt-heads.
At Heliopollis, at Sãn, at Sais, at Thebes, everywhere in short, we find long straight walls forming plain squares or parallelograms, without towers or bastions, ditches or outworks. The thickness of the walls, which varied from thirty to eighty feet, made such precautions needless.
It saves all the difficulty of absurd definitions, and bad explanations on points, lines, and surfaces, which are nothing but abstractions.... A cube presents many of the principal elements of geometry; it at once exhibits points, straight lines, parallel lines, angles, parallelograms, etc., etc. These cubes are divisible into various parts.
This must be obvious; for, if you say that the passage in vacuo of this cannon-ball, now held in my hand, would describe otherwise than a series of right lines, etc., then you are brought to the Reductio ad Absurdum, that the diagonals of parallelograms are " "All hands reef top-sail!" was now thundered forth by the boatswain's mates.
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