O Vitae Philosophia Dux!

A “hymn to science,” by English physician Mark Akenside, from the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1739:

Science! thou fair effusive ray
From the great source of mental day,
Free, generous, and refin’d!
Descend with all thy treasures fraught,
Illumine each bewilder’d thought,
And bless my lab’ring mind.

But first with thy resistless light,
Disperse those phantoms from my sight,
Those mimic shades of thee;
The scholiast’s learning, sophist’s cant,
The visionary bigot’s rant,
The monk’s philosophy.

O! let thy powerful charms impart
The patient head, the candid heart,
Devoted to thy sway;
Which no weak passions e’er mislead,
Which still with dauntless steps proceed
Where Reason points the way.

Give me to learn each secret cause;
Let number’s, figure’s, motion’s laws
Reveal’d before me stand;
These to great Nature’s scenes apply,
And round the globe, and thro’ the sky,
Disclose her working hand.

Next, to thy nobler search resign’d,
The busy, restless, human mind
Thro’ ev’ry maze pursue;
Detect Perception where it lies,
Catch the ideas as they rise,
And all their changes view.

Say from what simple springs began
The vast, ambitious thoughts of man,
Which range beyond control;
Which seek Eternity to trace,
Dive thro’ th’ infinity of space,
And strain to grasp the whole.

Her secret stores let Memory tell,
Bid Fancy quit her fairy cell,
In all her colours drest;
While prompt her sallies to control,
Reason, the judge, recalls the soul
To Truth’s severest test.

Then launch thro’ Being’s wide extent;
Let the fair scale, with just ascent,
And cautious steps, be trod;
And from the dead, corporeal mass,
Thro’ each progressive order pass
To Instinct, Reason, God.

There, Science! veil thy daring eye;
Nor dive too deep, nor soar too high,
In that divine abyss;
To Faith content thy beams to lend,
Her hopes t’ assure, her steps befriend,
And light her way to bliss.

Then downwards take thy flight agen;
Mix with the policies of men,
And social nature’s ties:
The plan, the genius of each state,
Its interest and its pow’rs relate,
Its fortunes and its rise.

Thro’ private life pursue thy course,
Trace every action to its source,
And means and motives weigh:
Put tempers, passions in the scale,
Mark what degrees in each prevail,
And fix the doubtful sway.

That last, best effort of thy skill,
To form the life, and rule the will,
Propitious pow’r! impart:
Teach me to cool my passion’s fires,
Make me the judge of my desires,
The master of my heart.

Raise me above the vulgar’s breath,
Pursuit of fortune, fear of death,
And all in life that’s mean.
Still true to reason be my plan,
Still let my action speak the man,
Thro’ every various scene.

Hail! queen of manners, light of truth;
Hail! charm of age, and guide of youth;
Sweet refuge of distress:
In business, thou! exact, polite;
Thou giv’st Retirement its delight,
Prosperity its grace.

Of wealth, pow’r, freedom, thou! the cause;
Foundress of order, cities, laws,
Of arts inventress, thou!
Without thee what were human kind?
How vast their wants, their thoughts how blind!
Their joys how mean! how few!

Sun of the soul! thy beams unveil!
Let others spread the daring sail,
On Fortune’s faithless sea;
While undeluded, happier I
From the vain tumult timely fly,
And sit in peace with thee.

| Poems · Science & Math

Relations

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that, to many men, there is something enjoyable in the sufferings of women, and therefore a propensity to cling to any theological or ethical code which makes it their duty to suffer patiently, even when there is no valid reason for not avoiding pain. The harm that theology has done is not to create cruel impulses, but to give them the sanction of what professes to be a lofty ethic, and to confer an apparently sacred character upon practices which have come down from more ignorant and barbarous ages.

— Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science, 1935

| Society

Noted

A curiosity from DePauw University mathematician Underwood Dudley: Arrange the six permutations of 1, 2, 3 in ascending order and find the differences of successive pairs:

123   132   213   231   312  321
    9     81    18    81    9

The top row totals 1,332, the bottom row 198. Arrange the first nine digits of π in triplets and add 198 to each:

314 159 265
198 198 198
--- --- ---
512 357 463

The three sums total 1,332.

(Underwood Dudley, “What to Do When the Trisector Comes,” Mathematical Intelligencer 5:1 [March 1983], 20-26, via Martin Gardner’s Whys & Wherefores, 1989.)

| Science & Math

Tight Quarters

A puzzle from Alcuin of York’s Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes (Problems to Sharpen the Young), 9th century:

“A man and his wife, each the weight of a loaded cart, who had two children each the weight of a small cart, needed to cross a river. However, the boat they came across could only carry the weight of one cart. Let him devise [a way] of crossing in order that the boat should not sink.”

(The boat can bear the weight of two children or one adult.)

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

The New Romantics

In 1982, Rob Thomson and William Palmer set out to convert the Oxford Book of English Verse into “non-emotive, non-sexist, modern language.” They began with the opening lines of Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper”:

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!

The new version:

Look at solo Ms McPherson,
In her field, a single person,
Cutting corn with vocal tune,
Stop, or leave her all alone.

There’s no sign they got any further.

| Poems

The Balliol Rhymes

In 1880, seven undergraduates at Balliol College, Oxford, published a broadsheet of 40 quatrains making fun of their masters. The college suppressed it, but a few copies survived, and librarian W.G. Hiscock published the collection in 1939:

First come I. My name is Jowett.
There’s no knowledge but I know it.
I am Master of this College,
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

Here am I, the often sat on
Dancing don; my name is Tatton;
Like old wine in a new bottle
Is my talk on Aristotle.

I am Huxley, blond and merry,
Fond of jokes and laughter, very:
If I laughed at what was witty,
I should laugh less, which were pity.

‘Tis not by feeding tea and shrimps on
That you’d become as thin as Simpson:
You might by trying to defer
So obstinate a questioner.

Here’s the whole collection, with notes identifying the poets and their targets.

| Poems

In a Word

polyhistor
n. a person of great and varied learning

edacious
adj. greedy, eager

perlegate
v. to read through

defatigate
v. to tire out, exhaust, fatigue

In his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, Edward John Trelawny describes Shelley’s thirst for knowledge as “unquenchable”:

I called on him one morning at ten, he was in his study with a German folio open, resting on the broad marble mantel-piece, over an old-fashioned fire-place, and with a dictionary in his hand. He always read standing if possible. He had promised over night to go with me, but now begged me to let him off. I then rode to Leghorn, eleven or twelve miles distant, and passed the day there; on returning at six in the evening to dine with Mrs. Shelley and the Williams’s, as I had engaged to do, I went into the Poet’s room and found him exactly in the position in which I had left him in the morning, but looking pale and exhausted.

Trelawny pointed to a plate of bread and meat and Shelley admitted that this must have been his dinner; “I thought I had eaten it.” Trelawny pulled him into the dining room, “but he brought a book with him and read more than he ate.”

| Literature

A Pearl

Writing to Robert Gathorne-Hardy in 1929, Logan Pearsall Smith referred to an account in the London Times of a solar eclipse as seen from Manila:

The weather was cloudless, the conditions were perfect. Acacia trees closed their leaves as for the night; dew fell, chickens roosted, and the peasants in outlying villages, terrified by the awful phenomenon, supplicated the Saints.

Smith wrote, “Could this sentence, which Flaubert might have written with the help of Gibbon, be the chance product of a journalist’s pen? I cannot think so.”

For the record, a Times archivist attributed the passage to Willmott Lewis, who was Washington correspondent for the paper from 1920 to 1948.

| Language