than the figure of the earth, and its relations to heavenly bodies.
Aristotle proved that the earth is a globe; Copernicus showed that it is
one of a system of planets revolving about the sun; Newton explained the
dynamics of this system. But at length came a certain John Hampden, who
with dauntless breast maintained that all this is wrong! His pamphlet
was prudently dedicated "to the unprofessional public and the common
sense men of Europe and America;" he knew that it could find no favor
with bigoted men of science. This Hampden, like his great namesake, is
nothing if not bold. "The Newtonian or Copernican theory," he tells us,
"from the first hour of its invention, has never dared to submit to an
appeal to facts!" Again, "Defenders it never had; and no threats, no
taunts or exposure, will ever rouse the energies of a single champion."
In other words, astronomers do not waste their time in noticing Mr.
Hampden's taunts and threats. Why is this so? His next sentence reminds
us that "cowardice always accompanies conscious guilt." He goes on to
tell us the true state of the case: "The earth, as it came from the
hands of its Almighty Creator, is a motionless Plane, based and built
upon foundations which the Word of God expressly declares cannot be
searched out or discovered.... The stars are hardly bigger than the gas
jets which light our streets, and, if they could be made to change
places with them, no astronomer could detect the difference." The North
Pole is the centre of the flat earth, and its extreme southern limit is
not a South Pole, but a circle 30,000 miles in circumference. Night is
caused by the sun passing behind a layer of clouds 7000 miles thick. It
is not gravitation which makes a river run down hill, but the impetus of
the water behind pressing on the water before. Is not this delicious? As
for Newton, poor fellow, he "lived in a superstitious age and district;
he was educated among an illiterate peasantry." This is like the way in
which the Baconizing cranks dispose of Shakespeare. So zealous was Mr.
Hampden that in 1876 he began publishing a periodical called "The Truth
Seeker's Oracle." Similar views were set forth by one Samuel Rowbotham,
who wrote under the name of "Parallax," and by a William Carpenter,
whose pamphlet, "One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe"
(Baltimore, 1885), is quite a curiosity; for example, Proof 33: "If the
earth were a globe, people--except those on top--would certainly have to
be fastened to its surface by some means or other;... but as we know
that we simply walk on its surface, without any other aid than that
which is necessary for locomotion on a plane, it follows that we have
herein a conclusive proof that Earth is not a globe." Since Mr.
Carpenter understands the matter so thoroughly, can we wonder at the
earnestness with which he rebukes the late Richard Proctor? "Mr.
Proctor, we charge you that, whilst you teach the theory of the earth's
rotundity, you KNOW that it is a plane!"
More original than Messrs. Hampden and Carpenter are the writers who
maintain that the earth is hollow, and supports a teeming population in
its interior. Early in the present century this idea came with the force
of a revelation to the mind of Captain John Cleves Symmes, a retired
army officer engaged in trade at St. Louis. In 1818 he issued a
circular, of which the following is an abridgment: "TO ALL THE WORLD I
declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of
solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at
the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this
truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and
aid me in the undertaking.... My terms are [Hear, Messrs. Quay and
Platt! and give ear, O Tammany!] _the_ PATRONAGE _of_ THIS _and the_ NEW
WORLDS.... I select Dr. S. L. Mitchell, Sir H. Davy, and Baron Alexander
von Humboldt as my protectors. I ask one hundred brave companions, well
equipped, to start from Siberia, in the fall season, with reindeer and
sleighs, on the ice of the frozen sea. I engage we find a warm and rich
land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men, on
reaching one degree northward of latitude 82°. We will return in the
succeeding spring."
This circular was sent by mail to men of science, colleges, learned
societies, legislatures, and municipal bodies, all over the United
States and Europe; for when it comes to postage, your crank seems always
to have unlimited funds at his disposal. At Paris, the distinguished
traveller, Count Volney, doubtless with a significant shrug, presented
the precious document to the Academy of Sciences, by which it was
mirthfully laid upon the table. Nowhere did learned men take it
seriously; it was generally set down as a rather stupid hoax. But,
nothing daunted by such treatment, the worthy Symmes began giving
lectures on the subject, and succeeded in making some impression upon an
uninstructed public. In 1824 his audience at Hamilton, Ohio, at the
close of a lecture, "_resolved_, that we esteem Symmes' Theory of the
Earth deserving of serious examination and worthy of the attention of
the American people." At a theatre in Cincinnati, a benefit was given
for the proposed polar expedition, and verses were recited suitable to
the occasion:--
"Has not Columbia one aspiring son
By whom the unfading laurel may be won?
Yes! history's pen may yet inscribe the name
Of SYMMES to grace her future scroll of fame."
The captain's petitions to Congress, however, praying for ships and men,
were heartlessly laid on the table, and nothing was left him but to keep
on crying in the wilderness, which he did until his death in 1829. In
the cemetery at Hamilton, the freestone monument over his grave, placed
there by his son, Americus Symmes, is surmounted with a hollow globe,
open at the poles.
Half a century later the son published a pamphlet,[47] in which he gave
a somewhat detailed exposition of his father's notions. From this we
learn that the interior world is well lighted; for the sun's rays,
passing through "the dense cold air of the verges" (that is, the
circular edge of the big polar hole), are powerfully refracted, and
after getting inside they are forthwith reflected from one concave
surface to another, with the result that the whole interior is
illuminated with a light equal to 3600 times that of the full moon. We
learn, too, that the famous Swedish geographer, Norpensjould (_semper
sic!_), after passing the magnetic pole, found a timbered country with
large rivers and abundant animal life. Afterward one Captain Wiggins
visited this country, where he found flax and wheat, highly magnetic
iron ore, and rich mines of copper and gold. The trees are as big as any
in California; hides, wool, tallow, ivory, and furs abound. The
inhabitants are very tall, with Roman noses, and speak Hebrew. Yes,
echoes Captain Tuttle, an old whaler, who also has visited this new
country, they speak Hebrew, and are a smart people. "Would it not be
logical," writes Americus, "to think that this was one of the lost
tribes of Israel? for we read in the Bible that they went up the
Euphrates to the north and dwelt in a land where man never dwelt
before." Just so; evidently, Messrs. "Norpensjould," Wiggins, and Tuttle
sailed "across the verge" and into the interior country, the concave
world, which shall henceforth be known as Symmzonia! The book ends with
the triumphant query, "Where were those explorers if not in the Hollow
of the Earth, and would they not have come out at the South Pole if they
had continued on their course?"
It is sad to have such positive conclusions disputed, but even in
eccentric lore the doctors are found to disagree. Scarcely had Americus
put forth his revised edition, when a pamphlet entitled "The Inner
World," by Frederick Culmer, was published at Salt Lake City (1886). Its
chapters have resounding titles: "I. The Universal Vacuity of Centres;
II. The Polar Orifices of the Earth; III. The Alleged Northwest Passage
and Symmes' Hole." We are told that although the polar orifices have
diameters of about a thousand miles each, nevertheless, in spite of
Wiggins and Tuttle, "there is no passage to the inner world on the north
of America;" on the contrary, it must be sought within the antarctic
circle. But Mr. Culmer would discourage rash attempts at exploration,
and believes that "no man will be able to plant the standard of his
country on any land in that region worth one dime to himself or any one
else at present." For this gloomy outlook we must try to console
ourselves with the knowledge that Mr. Culmer has detected the true
explanation of the Aurora Borealis: "It is the sun's rays shining on a
placid interior ocean and reflecting upon the outer atmosphere."
A favourite occupation of cranks is the discovery of hidden meanings in
things. Whether we are to say that the passionate quest of the occult
has been prolific in mental disturbances, or whether we had better say
that persons with ill-balanced minds take especial delight in the search
for the occult, the practical result is about the same. The impelling
motive is not very different from that of the circle-squarers; it is
pleasing to one's self-love to feel that one discerns things to which
all other people are blind. Hence the number of mare's-nests that have
been complacently stared into by learned donkeys is legion. Mere
erudition is no sure safeguard against the subtle forms which the
temptation takes on, as we may see from the ingenuity that has been
wasted on the Great Pyramid. In 1864, Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for
Scotland, published his book entitled "Our Inheritance in the Great
Pyramid," and afterward followed it with other similar books. Whatever
may have been the original complexion of this gentleman's mind, it was
not such as to prevent his attaining distinction and achieving
usefulness as a practical astronomer. But the pyramids were too much for
his mental equilibrium. As De Morgan kindly puts it, "his work on Egypt
is paradox of a very high order, backed by a great quantity of useful
labour, the results of which will be made available by those who do not
receive the paradoxes."
The pyramidal tombs of Egyptian kings were an evolution in stone or
brick from the tumulus of earth which in prehistoric ages was heaped
over the body of the war chief. They are objects of rare dignity and
interest, not only from their immense size, but from sundry
peculiarities in their construction. In their orientation great care was
taken, though usually with imperfect success. Their sides face the four
cardinal points, and the descending entry-way forms a kind of telescope,
from the bottom of which an observer, sixty centuries ago, could look
out at what was then the polestar. These and other features of the
pyramids are no doubt connected with Egyptian religion, and may very
likely have subserved astrological purposes. But what say the pyramid
cranks, or "pyramidalists," as they have been called?
According to them, the builders of the Great Pyramid were supernaturally
instructed, probably by Melchizedek, King of Salem. Thus they were
enabled to place it in latitude 30° N.; to make its four sides face the
cardinal points; to adopt the sacred cubit, or one twenty millionth part
of the earth's polar axis, as their unit of length; "and to make the
side of the square base equal to just so many of these sacred cubits as
there are days and parts of a day in a year. They were further by
supernatural help enabled to square the circle, and symbolized their
victory over this problem by making the pyramid's height bear to the
perimeter of the base the ratio which the radius of a circle bears to
the circumference."[48] In like manner, by immediate divine revelation,
the builders of the pyramid were instructed as to the exact shape and
density of the earth, the sun's distance, the precession of the
equinoxes, etc., so that their figures on all these subjects were more
accurate than any that modern science has obtained, and these figures
they built into the pyramid. They also built into it the divinely
revealed and everlasting standards of "length, area, capacity, weight,
density, heat, time, and money," and finally they wrought into its
structure the precise date at which the millennium is to begin. All this
valuable information, handed down directly from heaven, was thus
securely bottled up in the Great Pyramid for six thousand years or so,
awaiting the auspicious day when Mr. Piazzi Smyth should come and draw
the cork. Why so much knowledge should have been bestowed upon the
architects of King Cheops, only to be concealed from posterity, is a
pertinent question; and one may also ask, why was it worth while to
bring a Piazzi Smyth into the world to reveal it, since plodding human
reason had after all by slow degrees discovered every bit of it, except
the date of the millennium? Why, moreover, did the revelation thus
elaborately buried in or about B. C. 4000 come just abreast of the
scientific knowledge of A. D. 1864, and there stop short? Is it credible
that old Melchizedek knew nothing about the telephone, or the Roentgen
ray, or the cholera bacillus? Our pyramidalists should be more
enterprising, and elicit from their venerable fetish some useful hints
as to wireless telegraphy, or the ventilation of Pullman cars, or the
purification of Pennsylvania politics. Perhaps the last-named problem
might vie in difficulty with squaring the circle!
The lucubrations of Piazzi Smyth, like those of Miss Delia Bacon, called
into existence a considerable quantity of eccentric literature. For
example, there is Skinner's "Key to the Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery in the
Source of Measures originating the British Inch and the Ancient Cubit,"
published in Cincinnati in 1875, a tall octavo of 324 pages, bristling
with diagrams and decimals, Hebrew words and logarithms. The book begins
by getting the circle neatly squared, and then goes on to aver that
sundry crosses, including the Christian cross, are an emblematic display
of the origin of measures. The "mound-builders" come in for a share of
the author's attention; for the mounds are "alike Typhonic emblems with
the pyramid of Egypt and with Hebrew symbols." A Typhonic emblem relates
to Typhon, the "lord of sepulture," whose Egyptian representative was
the crocodile, as his Hebrew representative was the hog; "exemplified in
the Christian books by the devil leaving the man and passing into the
herd of swine, which thereupon rushed into the sea, another emblem of
Typhon." Yet another such emblem is a mound in Ohio which simulates the
contour of an alligator. A certain Aztec pyramid, described by Humboldt,
has 318 niches, apparently in allusion to the days of the old Mexican
civil calendar. Mr. Skinner sees in this numeral the value of Pi, and
furthermore informs us that 318 is the Gnostic symbol for Christ, as
well as the number of Abraham's trained servants. Frequent use of it is
made in the Great Pyramid; for example, multiplied by six it gives the
height of the king's chamber, and multiplied by two it gives half the
base side of that apartment. Our author then puts the pyramid into a
sphere, and after this feat it is an easy transition to Noah's flood,
the zodiac, and modern ritualism. Of similar purport, though more
concise than this octavo, is Dr. Watson Quinby's "Solomon's Seal, a Key
to the Pyramid," published at Wilmington, Delaware, in 1880. From this
little book we learn that "in the early days of the world some one
measured the earth, and found its diameter, in round numbers, to be
41,569,000 feet, or 498,828,000 inches;" also that "Vishnu means
Fish-Nuh, Noah-the-Fish, in allusion to his sojourn in the ark."
Moreover, the Institutes of Manu were written by Noah, since Maha-Nuh =
Great-Noah! With equal felicity, Rev. Edward Dingle (in his "The Balance
of Physics, the Square of the Circle, and the Earth's True Solar and
Lunar Distances," London, 1885, pp. 246) declares that "my success, let
it be held what it may, was secured by cleaving to the Mosaic initiation
of the Sabbatic number for my radius." At the end of his book Mr.
Dingle exclaims: "To the Lord be all thanksgiving, who has kept my
intellect and the directing of its thoughts sound, while seeking to
deliver his word from the exulting shouts of his enemies and the
seducers of mankind!"
From these grotesque rigmaroles it is not a long step to the
lucubrations of the writers in whose bonnets the bee of prophecy has
buzzed until they have come to fancy themselves skilled interpreters.
There is apt to be the same droll mixing of arithmetic with history that
we find among the pyramid cranks, and to the performance of such antics
the book of Daniel and the Apocalypse present irresistible temptations.
In my library days, I never used to pick up a commentary on either of
those books without looking for some of the stigmata or witch-marks of
crankery. Many a feeble intellect has been toppled over by that shining
image, with head of gold and feet of iron and clay, which Nebuchadnezzar
beheld in a dream. For example, let us take a few sentences from
"Emmanuel: An Original and Exhaustive Commentary on Creation and
Providence Alike. By an Octogenarian Layman," London, 1883, pp. 420:
"Upwards of thirty years ago, a fancy for chronological research,
fostered by boundless leisure and a competent facility in mental
calculation, riveted my attention on the metallic image, in the vague
hope of symmetrizing the four sections of the collective emblem with the
successive dominations of the individual empires. Failing in so shadowy
an aspiration, I seemed to be more than compensated by detecting an
identity of duration, equally pregnant and positive, between the gold
and the silver and the brass and the iron taken together on the one
hand, and the mountain that was to crush them all to powder on the
other,--the former aggregate being assumed to stretch from
Nebuchadnezzar's succession in 606 B. C. to the dethronement of
Augustulus in 476 A. D., and the latter again from the epoch just
specified to Elizabeth's purgation of the Sanctuary in 1558." Having
thus taken two equal periods of 1082 years, our Octogenarian proceeds to
break them up (Heaven knows why!) each into four periods of 68, 204,
269, and 541 years. Then we are treated to the following equations:--
68 = 2 × 34
204 = 6 × 34
269 = 5 × 34 + 3 × 33
541 = 13 × 34 + 3 × 33
Hence, "with such a fulcrum as the Lamb slain before the foundation of
the world, and such a lever as the span of the Victim's sublunary
humiliation, was I too rash in aiming at a result infinitely grander
than Archimedes's speculative displacement of the earth?"
That eminent mathematician, Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch, used to say that
sometimes, when Laplace passed from one equation to the next with an
"evidently," he would find a week's study necessary to cross the abyss
which the transcendent mind of the master traversed in a single leap. I
fancy that more than a week would be needed to fathom the Octogenarian's
"hence," and it would by no means be worth while to go through so much
and get so little. After a few pages of the Octogenarian, we are
prepared to hear that in 1750 one Henry Sullamar squared the circle by
the number of the Beast with seven heads and ten horns; and that in 1753
a certain French officer, M. de Causans, "cut a circular piece of turf,
squared it, and deduced original sin and the Trinity."[49]
The reader is doubtless by this time weary of so much tomfoolery; but as
it is needful, for the due comprehension of crankery and its crotchets,
that he should by and by have still more of it, I will give him a
moment's relief while I tell of a little game with which De Morgan and
Whewell once amused themselves. The task was to make a sentence which
should contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only once. "No
one," says De Morgan, "has done it with _v_ and _j_ treated as
consonants; but _you_ and _I_ can do it" (_u_ and _i_: oh, monstrous
pun!). Dr. Whewell got only separate words, and failed to make a
sentence: _phiz_, _styx_, _wrong_, _buck_, _flame_, _quid_. Very pretty,
but De Morgan beat him out of sight with this weird sentiment; _I,
quartz pyx, who fling muck beds!_ Well, what in the world can that mean?
"I long thought that no human being could say it under any
circumstances. At last I happened to be reading a religious writer--as
he thought himself--who threw aspersions on his opponents thick and
threefold. Heyday! came into my head, this fellow flings muck beds: he
must be a quartz pyx. And then I remembered that a pyx is a sacred
vessel, and quartz is a hard stone, as hard as the heart of a religious
foe-curser. So that the line is the motto of the ferocious sectarian,
who turns his religious vessels into mud-holders for the benefit of
those who will not see what he sees."[50]
I cite this drollery to show the world-wide difference between the
playful nonsense of the wise man and the strenuous nonsense of the
monomaniac; in this little _cabbala alphabetica_, moreover, a great
deal of the cabalistic lore which cumbers library shelves is neatly
satirized.
As already observed, my rule was never to put into the class of
eccentric literature any books save such as seemed to have emanated from
diseased brains. To hold and absurd belief, to write in its defense, to
shape one's career in accordance with it, is no proof of an unsound
mind. Of the hundreds of enthusiasts who spent their lives in quest of
the philosopher's stone, many were doubtless cranks; but many were able
thinkers who made the best use they could of the scientific resources of
the time. Wrong ways must often be tried before the right way can be
found. Even the early circle-squarers cannot fairly be charged with
crankery; they sinned against no light that was accessible to them. But
anybody who to-day should advertise a recipe for turning base metals
into gold would meet with a chill welcome from chemists. He would
speedily be posted as a quack, though doubtless many weak heads would be
turned by him. It is the perverse sinning against light that is one of
the most abiding features of crankery, and from this point of view such
a book as "Coin's Financial School" has many claims for admission to the
limbo of eccentric literature.
About seventy years ago, one John Ranking published in London a volume
entitled "Historical Researches on the Conquest of Peru, Mexico, Bogota,
Natchez, and Talomeco,[51] in the Thirteenth Century, by the Mongols,
accompanied with Elephants." It is well known that in 1281 the Mongols,
after conquering pretty much everything from the Carpathian Mountains
and the river Euphrates to the Yellow Sea, invaded Japan. A typhoon
dispersed their fleet; and their army of more than 100,000 men, cut off
from its communications, was completely annihilated by the Japanese. But
Mr. Ranking believed that this wholesale destruction was a fiction of
the chroniclers. He maintained that most of the army escaped in a new
fleet and crossed the Pacific Ocean, taking with them a host of
elephants, with the aid of which they made extensive conquests in
America and founded kingdoms in Mexico and Peru. The widespread fossil
remains of the American mastodon he took to be the bones of these
Mongolian elephants. Now, this is an extremely wild theory, unsound and
untenable in every particular, but it does not bring Mr. Ranking's book
within the class of eccentric literature. The author was deficient in
scholarship and in critical judgment, but he was not daft.