of the class to indulge in a carnival of absurdity wherein senseless accusations were flung about at random?
Let us return to the subject of Analytical Geometry.
The tangent to an ellipse is an imaginary straight line, representing the path which would be followed by the body tracing the ellipse, if its connection with the attracting focus were suddenly to cease. In its essence, the tangent is a sublime effort of the scientific imagination; it pictures the result of a sudden cessation of the action of gravity. In practice the tangent is a convenient line for indicating the curvature at any given point. The educational sentimentalists who object to mechanicalness, ought, if consistent, never to use a tangent in working a problem, without stopping to realize the grandeur of the idea involved. As a matter of fact, such incessant strain on the imagination and on the perception of the sublime is unhealthy and deadening. It is far better to use tangents, mechanically, as mere measuring-rods. But a good teacher will take care that no pupil goes through a year's work at Analytical Geometry without having been, once or twice, aroused to perceive the wonderful poetic conceptions represented by the lines he is using.
In our supposed disorderly College, a sentimental poet might take upon himself to reprove the Geometry teacher for allowing so awful a conception as the sudden cessation of gravity to be degraded by being talked of as a mere convenience, without due realization of its horror; a scientist holding utilitarian views might retort, that the function of the instructor being to impart truth, no such thing as the cessation of gravity ought ever to
