_April 5, 1864._--Mr. Smith continues to write me long letters, to which he hints that I am to answer. In his last, of 31 closely written sides of note-paper, he informs me, with reference to my obstinate silence, that though I think myself and am thought by others to be a mathematical Goliath, I have resolved to play the mathematical snail, and keep within my shell. A mathematical _snail_! This cannot be the thing so called which regulates the striking of a clock; for it would mean that I am to make Mr. Smith sound the true time of day, which I would by no means undertake upon a clock that gains 19 seconds odd in every hour by false quadrature. But he ventures to tell me that pebbles from the sling of simple truth and common sense will ultimately crack my shell, and put me _hors de combat_.[220] The confusion of images is amusing: Goliath turning himself into a snail to avoid [pi] = 3-1/8, and James Smith, Esq., of the Mersey Dock Board: and put _hors de combat_--which should have been _caché_[221]--by pebbles from a sling. If Goliath had crept into a snail-shell, David would have cracked the Philistine with his foot. There is something like modesty in the implication that the crack-shell pebble has not yet taken effect; it might have been thought that the slinger would by this time have been singing--
"And thrice [and one-eighth] I routed all my foes, And thrice [and one-eighth] I slew the slain."
But he promises to give the public his nut-cracker if I do not, before the Budget is concluded, "unravel" the paradox, which is the mathematico-geometrical nut he has given me to crack. Mr. Smith is a crack man: he will crack his own nut; he will crack my shell; in the mean time he cracks himself up. Heaven send he do not crack himself into lateral contiguity with himself.
On June 27 I received a letter, in the handwriting of Mr. James Smith, signed Nauticus. I have ascertained { 126} that one of the letters to the _Athenæum_ signed Nauticus is in the same handwriting. I make a few extracts:
"... The important question at issue has been treated by a brace of mathematical birds with too much levity. It may be said, however, that sarcasm and ridicule sometimes succeed, where reason fails.... Such a course is not well suited to a discussion.... For this reason I shall for the future [this implies there has been a past, so that Nauticus is not before me for the first time] endeavor to confine myself to dry reasoning from incontrovertible premises.