second says, "It is perfectly crazy to attempt to teach people to think of curves without axes." A third says, "I really do think there is something in your view; but this much is clear: when you accepted a post in this College, you undertook to use a standard text-book, and to teach on ordinary lines. If you have theories different from those generally accepted, you were at least bound to give up your post before you began to express them; then we could have respected you. To stop here and to suggest doubts to the pupils is dishonest and scandalous; and your conduct makes me doubt the honesty of everything you say." A fourth says, "You are right, and all the books are wrong. It is a shame that children should be taught to believe fictions; away with these stupid books that have misled the world so long." A fifth is indignant that the grand old sages who created Astronomy should be accused of inventing falsehoods to serve their own ends; the sixth, on the contrary, is angry that the time of the class should be wasted on listening to, and trying to follow, the mental History of a set of savages who lived before Analytical Geometry had become a Science. And some clever young lecturer, who happens to have heard that our solar system, as a whole, is in motion, and who fancies that such knowledge is his own peculiar property, triumphantly asserts that the earth-path is not an ellipse, but an elliptical spiral; and that any statement based on the premise that the ellipse represents a planet-path must be false throughout. Now what chance would any of us have of teaching anything to a class subject to such interruptions of the normal current of thought? In a College where such disorder prevailed, would the
