But I myself, it will be remarked, have employed such humor as I can command "in favor of establishment." What it is worth I am not to judge; as usual in such cases, those who are of my cabal pronounce it good, but cyclometers and other paradoxers either call it very poor, or commend it as sheer buffoonery. Be it one or the other, I observe that all the effective ridicule is, in this subject, on the side of establishment. This is partly due to the difficulty of quizzing plain and sober demonstration; but so much, if not more, to the ignorance of the paradoxers. For that which cannot be _ridiculed_, can be _turned into ridicule_ by those who know how. But by the time a person is deep enough in _negative_ quantities, and _impossible_ quantities, to be able to satirize them, he is caught, and being inclined to become a _user_, shrinks from being an _abuser_. Imagine a person with a gift of ridicule, and knowledge enough, trying his hand on the junction of the assertions which he will find in various books of algebra. First, that a negative quantity has no logarithm; secondly, that a {320} negative quantity has no square root; thirdly, that the first non-existent is to the second as the circumference of a circle to its diameter. One great reason of the allowance of such unsound modes of expression is the confidence felt by the writers that [root]-1 and log(-1) will make their way, however inaccurately described. I heartily wish that the cyclometers had knowledge enough to attack the weak points of algebraical diction: they would soon work a beneficial change.[689] AN EARLY METEOROLOGIST. Recueil de ma vie, mes ouvrages et mes pensees. Par Thomas Ignace Marie Forster.[690] Brussels, 1836, 12mo. Mr. Forster, an Englishman settled at Bruges, was an observer in many subjects, but especially in meteorology. He communicated to the Astronomical Society, in 1848, the information that, in the registers kept by his grandfather, his father, and himself, beginning in 1767, new moon on Saturday was followed, nineteen times out of twenty, by twenty days of rain and wind. This statement being published in the _Athenaeum_, a cluster of correspondents averred that the belief is common among seamen, in all parts of the world, and among landsmen too. Some one quoted a distich: "Saturday's moon and Sunday's full Never were fine and never _wull_." {321} Another brought forward: "If a Saturday's moon Comes once in seven years it comes too soon." Mr. Forster did not say he was aware of the proverbial character of the phenomenon. He was a very eccentric man. He treated his dogs as friends, and buried them with ceremony. He quarrelled with the _cure_ of his parish, who remarked that he could not take his dogs to heaven with him. I will go nowhere, said he, where I cannot take my dog. He was a sincere Catholic: but there is a point beyond which even churches have no influence.