A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I | Page 5

grandfathers by the report of their fathers. But even on this point it is remarkable how many of the greatest names in all departments of knowledge have been real antiquaries in their several subjects.
I may cite, among those who have wrought strongly upon opinion or practice in science, Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Ramus, Tycho Brah��, Galileo, Napier, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke. I take none but names known out of their {6} fields of work; and all were learned as well as sagacious. I have chosen my instances: if any one will undertake to show a person of little or no knowledge who has established himself in a great matter of pure thought, let him bring forward his man, and we shall see.
This is the true way of putting off those who plague others with their great discoveries. The first demand made should be--Mr. Moses, before I allow you to lead me over the Red Sea, I must have you show that you are learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians upon your own subject. The plea that it is unlikely that this or that unknown person should succeed where Newton, etc. have failed, or should show Newton, etc. to be wrong, is utterly null and void. It was worthily versified by Sylvanus Morgan (the great herald who in his Sphere of Gentry gave coat armor to "Gentleman Jesus," as he said), who sang of Copernicus as follows (1652):
"If Tellus winged be, The earth a motion round; Then much deceived are they Who nere before it found. Solomon was the wisest, His wit nere this attained; Cease, then, Copernicus, Thy hypothesis is vain."
Newton, etc. were once unknown; but they made themselves known by what they knew, and then brought forward what they could do; which I see is as good verse as that of Herald Sylvanus. The demand for previous knowledge disposes of twenty-nine cases out of thirty, and the thirtieth is worth listening to.
I have not set down Copernicus, Galileo, etc. among the paradoxers, merely because everybody knows them; if my list were quite complete, they would have been in it. But the reader will find Gilbert, the great precursor of sound magnetical theory; and several others on whom no censure can be cast, though some of their paradoxes are inadmissible, {7} some unprovoked, and some capital jokes, true or false: the author of Vestiges of Creation is an instance. I expect that my old correspondent, General Perronet Thompson, will admit that his geometry is part and parcel of my plan; and also that, if that plan embraced politics, he would claim a place for his Catechism on the Corn Laws, a work at one time paradoxical, but which had more to do with the abolition of the bread-tax than Sir Robert Peel.
My intention in publishing this Budget in the Athen?um is to enable those who have been puzzled by one or two discoverers to see how they look in a lump. The only question is, has the selection been fairly made? To this my answer is, that no selection at all has been made. The books are, without exception, those which I have in my own library; and I have taken all--I mean all of the kind: Heaven forbid that I should be supposed to have no other books! But I may have been a collector, influenced in choice by bias? I answer that I never have collected books of this sort--that is, I have never searched for them, never made up my mind to look out for this book or that. I have bought what happened to come in my way at show or auction; I have retained what came in as part of the undescribed portion of miscellaneous auction lots; I have received a few from friends who found them among what they called their rubbish; and I have preserved books sent to me for review. In not a few instances the books have been bound up with others, unmentioned at the back; and for years I knew no more I had them than I knew I had Lord Macclesfield's speech on moving the change of Style, which, after I had searched shops, etc. for it in vain, I found had been reposing on my own shelves for many years, at the end of a summary of Leibnitz's philosophy. Consequently, I may positively affirm that the following list is formed by accident and circumstance alone, and that it truly represents the casualties of about a third of a century. For instance, the large proportion of works {8} on the quadrature of the circle is not my doing: it is the natural share of this subject in the actual run of events.
[I keep to my plan of inserting only such books