incredible—I shall have attained all I can reasonably expect. Were I to attempt further details I should only perplex. Yet for the sake of the young and inexperienced, who may perchance infer—from the two simple instances I have given above, of the manner in which I should recognize my father and my sons—that Recognition by sight is an easy affair, it may be needful to point out that in actual life most of the problems of Sight Recognition are far more subtle and complex.
If for example, when my father, the Triangle, approaches me, he happens to present his side to me instead of his angle, then, until I have asked him to rotate, or until I have edged my eye round him, I am for the moment doubtful whether he may not be a Straight Line, or, in other words, a woman. Again, when I am in the company of one of my two hexagonal grandsons, contemplating one of his sides ( AB ) full front, it will be evident from the accompanying diagram that I shall see one whole line ( AB ) in comparative brightness (shading off hardly at all at the ends) and two smaller lines ( CA and BD ) dim throughout and shading away into greater dimness towards the extremities C and D .
But I must not give way to the temptation of enlarging on these topics. The meanest mathematician in Spaceland will readily believe me when I assert that the problems of life, which present themselves to the well-educated—when they are themselves in motion, rotating, advancing or retreating, and at the same time attempting to discriminate by the sense of sight between a number of Polygons of high rank moving in different directions, as for example in a ballroom or conversazione—must be of a nature to task the angularity of the most intellectual, and amply justify the rich endowments of the Learned Professors of geometry, both static and kinetic, in the illustrious University of Wentbridge, where the Science and Art of Sight Recognition are regularly taught to large classes of the elite of the States.
It is only a few of the scions of our noblest and wealthiest houses, who are able to give the time and money necessary for the thorough