To this example of strained inference I will join an example of what seems like deliberate misconstruction. From one of my essays (not among the works he professes to deal with) the reviewer, to strengthen his attack, brings {294} a strange mistake; which, even without inquiry, any fair-minded reader would see must be an oversight. A statement true of a single body acted on by a tractive force, I have inadvertently pluralized: being so possessed by another aspect of the question, as to overlook the obvious fact that with a plurality of bodies the statement became untrue. Not only, however, does the reviewer ignore various evidences furnished by the works before him, that I could not really think what I had there said, but he ignores a direct contradiction contained in the paragraph succeeding that from which he quotes. So that the case stands thus:—On two adjacent pages I have made two opposite statements, both of which I cannot be supposed to believe. One of them is right; and this the reviewer assumes I do not believe. One of them is glaringly wrong; and this the reviewer assumes I do believe. Why he made this choice no one who reads his criticism will fail to see. Even had his judgments more authority than is given to them by his mathematical honours, this brief characterization would, I think, suffice. Perhaps already, in rebutting the assumption that I did not answer his allegations because they were unanswerable, I have ascribed to them an unmerited importance. For the rest, suggesting that their value may be measured by the value of that above dealt with as a sample, I leave them to be answered by the works they are directed against.