The Quadrature of the circle, or the true ratio between the diameter and circumference geometrically and mathematically demonstrated. By James Smith, Esq. Liverpool, 1865, 8vo.
[On the relations between the dimensions and distances of the Sun, Moon, and Earth; a paper read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, Jan. 25, 1864. By James Smith, Esq.
The British Association in Jeopardy, and Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, in the stocks without hope of escape. Printed for the authors (J. S. confessed, and also hidden under _Nauticus_). (No date, 1865).
The British Association in Jeopardy, and Professor De Morgan in the Pillory without hope of escape. London, 1866, 8vo.]
When my work appeared in numbers, I had not anything like an adequate idea of Mr. James Smith's superiority to the rest of the world in the points in which he is superior. He is beyond a doubt the ablest head at unreasoning, and the greatest hand at writing it, of all who have tried in our day to attach their names to an error. Common cyclometers sink into puny orthodoxy by his side.
The behavior of this singular character induces me to pay him the compliment which Achilles paid Hector, to drag him round the walls again and again. He was treated with unusual notice and in the most gentle manner. The unnamed mathematician, E. M. bestowed a volume of mild correspondence upon him; Rowan Hamilton[201] quietly proved him wrong in a way accessible to an ordinary schoolboy; Whewell,[202] as we shall see, gave him the means of seeing himself wrong, even more easily than by Hamilton's method. Nothing would do; it was small kick and silly fling at all; and he exposed his conceit by alleging that he, James Smith, had placed Whewell in the stocks. He will therefore be universally pronounced a proper object of the severest literary punishment: but the opinion of all who can put two propositions together will be that of the many strokes I have given, the hardest and most telling are my republications of his own attempts to reason.
He will come out of my hands in the position he ought { 105} to hold, the Supreme Pontiff of cyclometers, the vicegerent of St. Vitus upon earth, the Mamamouchi of burlesque on inference. I begin with a review of him which appeared in the _Athenæum_ of May 11, 1861. Mr. Smith says I wrote it: this I neither affirm nor deny; to do either would be a sin against the editorial system elsewhere described. Many persons tell me they know me by my style; let them form a guess: I can only say that many have declared as above while fastening on me something which I had never seen nor heard of.