There is a little derision of the _Athenæum_ and a merited punishment for "that unscrupulous critic and contemptible mathematical twaddler, De Morgan."
At p. 183 I mentioned Mr. Reddie,[650] the author of _Vis Inertiæ Victa_ and of _Victoria toto coelo_,[651] which last is not { 345} an address to the whole heaven, either from a Roman Goddess or a British Queen, whatever a scholar may suppose. Between these Mr. Reddie has published _The Mechanics of the Heavens_, 8vo, 1862: this I never saw until he sent it to me, with an invitation to notice it, he very well knowing that it would catch. His speculations do battle with common notions of mathematics and of mechanics, which, to use a feminine idiom, he blasphemes so you can't think! and I suspect that if you do not blaspheme them too, _you_ can't think. He appeals to the "truly scientific," and would be glad to have readers who have read what he controverts, i.e., Newton's _Principia_: I wish he may get them; I mean I hope he may obtain them. To none but these would an account of his speculations be intelligible: I accordingly disposed of him in a very short paragraph of description. Now many paradoxers desire notice, even though it be disparaging. I have letters from more than one--besides what have been sent to the Editor of the _Athenæum_--complaining that they are not laughed at; although they deserve it, they tell me, as much as some whom I have inserted. Mr. Reddie informs me that I have not said a single word against his books, though I have given nearly a column to sixteen-string arithmetic, and as much to animalcule universes. What need to say anything to readers of Newton against a book from which I quoted that revolution by gravitation is _demonstrably_ impossible? It would be as useless as evidence against a man who has pleaded guilty. Mr. Reddie derisively thanks me for "small mercies"; he wrote me private letters; he published them, and more, in the _Correspondent_. He gave me, _pro viribus suis_,[652] such a dressing you can't think, both for my Budget non-notice, and for reviews which he assumed me to have written. He outlawed himself by declaring (_Correspondent_, Nov. 11, 1856) that I--in a review--had made a quotation which was "garbled, evidently on purpose { 346} to make it appear that" he "was advocating solely a geocentric hypothesis, which is not true." In fact, he did his best to get larger "mercy." And he shall have it; and at a length which shall content him, unless his mecometer be an insatiable apparatus. But I fear that in other respects I shall no more satisfy him than the Irish drummer satisfied the poor culprit when, after several times changing the direction of the stroke at earnest entreaty, he was at last provoked to call out, "Bad cess to ye, ye spalpeen! strike where one will, there's no _plasing_ ye!"