(_August 28, 1865._) The _Zetetic Astronomy_ has come into my hands. When, in 1851, I went to see the Great Exhibition, I heard an organ played by a performer who seemed very desirous to exhibit one particular stop. "What do you think of that stop?" I was asked.--"That depends on the name of it," said I.--"Oh! what can the name have to do with the sound? 'that which we call a rose,' etc."--"The name has everything to do with it: if it be a flute-stop, I think it very harsh; but if it be a railway-whistle-stop, I think it very sweet." So as to this book: if it be childish, it is clever; if it be mannish, it is unusually foolish. The flat earth, floating tremulously on the sea; the sun moving always over the flat, giving day when near enough, and night when too far off; the self-luminous moon, with a semi-transparent invisible moon, created to give her an eclipse now and then; the new law of perspective, by which the vanishing of the hull before the masts, usually thought to prove the earth globular, really proves it flat;--all these and other things are well fitted to form exercises for a person who is learning the elements of astronomy. The manner in which the sun dips into the sea, especially in tropical climates, upsets the whole. Mungo Park,[187] I think, gives an African hypothesis which explains phenomena better than this. The sun dips into the western ocean, and the people there cut him in pieces, fry him in a pan, and then join him together again, take him round the underway, and set him up in the east. I hope this book will be read, and that many will be puzzled by it: for there are many whose notions of astronomy deserve no better fate. There is no subject on which there is so little { 92} accurate conception as that of the motions of the heavenly bodies. The author, though confident in the extreme, neither impeaches the honesty of those whose opinions he assails, nor allots them any future inconvenience: in these points he is worthy to live on a globe, and to revolve in twenty-four hours.
(_October, 1866._) A follower appears, in a work dedicated to the preceding author: it is _Theoretical Astronomy examined and exposed by Common Sense_. The author has 128 well-stuffed octavo pages. I hope he will not be the last. He prints the newspaper accounts of his work: the _Church Times_ says--not seeing how the satire might be retorted--"We never began to despair of Scripture until we discovered that 'Common Sense' had taken up the cudgels in its defence." This paper considers our author as the type of a _Protestant_. The author himself, who gives a summary of his arguments in verse, has one couplet which is worth quoting: