The earth-flatteners I have been speaking of claim, as one of their objects, the defence of Scripture. But some of the earth-flatteners of the last generation (or a little farther back) took quite another view of the matter. For instance, Sir Richard Phillips, a more vehement earth-flattener than Parallax, was so little interested in defending the Scriptures, that in 1793 he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for selling a book regarded as atheistic. In 1836 he attempted the conversion of Professor De Morgan, opening the correspondence with the remark that he had 'an inveterate abhorrence of all the pretended wisdom of philosophy derived from the monks and doctors of the Middle Ages, and not less those of higher name who merely sought to make the monkish philosophy more plausible, or so to disguise it as to mystify the mob of small thinkers.' He seems himself to have succeeded in mystifying many of those whom he intended to convert. Admiral Smyth gives the following account of an interview he had with Phillips: 'This pseudo-mathematical knight once called upon me at Bedford, without any previous acquaintance, to discuss "those errors of Newton, which he almost blushed to name," and which were inserted in the "Principia" to "puzzle the vulgar." He sneered with sovereign contempt at the "Trinity of Gravitating Force, Projectile Force, and Void Space," and proved that all change of place is accounted for by motion.' [Startling hypothesis!] 'He then exemplified the conditions by placing some pieces of paper on a table, and slapping his hand down close to them, thus making them fly off, which he termed applying the momentum. All motion, he said, is in the direction of the forces; and atoms seek the centre by "terrestrial centripetation"--a property which causes universal pressure; but in what these attributes of pushing and pulling differ from gravitation and attraction was not expounded. Many of his "truths" were as mystified as the conundrums of Rabelais; so nothing was made of the motion.' A favourite subject of paradoxical ideas has been the moon's motion of rotation. Strangely enough, De Morgan, who knew more about past paradoxists than any man of his time, seems not to have heard of the dispute between Keill and Bentley over this matter in 1690. He says, 'there was a dispute on the subject, in 1748, between James Ferguson and an anonymous opponent; and I think there have been others;' but the older and more interesting dispute he does not mention. Bentley, who was no mathematician, pointed out in a lecture certain reasons for believing that the moon does not turn on her axis, or has no axis on which she turns. Keill, then only nineteen years old, pointed out that the arguments used by Bentley proved that the moon does rotate instead of showing that she does not. (Twenty years later Keill was appointed Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. He was the first holder of that office to teach the Newtonian astronomy.)