point, from the very circumstance of its being taken for granted at once and the attention drawn off to some other question, likely to be admitted on insufficient evidence, and the flaws in that evidence overlooked? Experience will teach us that such instances often occur. Witness the well-known anecdote of the Royal Society, to whom King Charles II. proposed as a question, whence it is that a vessel of water receives no addition of weight from a live fish being put into it, though it does if the fish be dead. Various solutions, of great ingenuity, were proposed, discussed, objected to, and defended; nor was it till they had been long bewildered in the inquiry, that it occurred to them to try the experiment; by which they at once ascertained that the phenomenon which they were striving to account for,—which was the acknowledged base and substratum, as it were, of their debates,—had no existence but in the invention of the witty monarch.[1]
Another instance of the same kind is so very remarkable that I cannot forbear mentioning it. It was objected to the system of Copernicus when it was first brought forward, that if the earth turned oh its axis, as he represented, a stone dropped from the summit of a tower would not fall at the foot of it, but at a great distance to the west; in the same manner as a stone dropped from the masthead of a ship in full sail does not fall at the foot of the mast, but towards the stern. To this it was answered, that a stone, being a part of the earth, obeys the same laws, and moves with it; whereas, it is no part
- ↑ "A report is spread (says Voltaire in one of his works) that there is in some country or other a giant as big as a mountain; and men presently fall to hot disputing concerning the precise length of his nose, the breadth of his thumb, and other particulars, and anathematize each other for heterodoxy of belief concerning them. In the midst of all, if some bold sceptic ventures to hint a doubt as to the existence of this giant, all are ready to join against him and tear him to pieces." This looks almost like a prophetic allegory relating to the gigantic Napoleon.
