Ver. 100. _Far-extended heel_—The personification of _Rectangle_, besides answering a poetical purpose, was necessary to illustrate Mr. HIGGINS’S philosophical opinions. The ancient mathematicians conceived that a cone was generated by the revolution of a triangle; but this, as our author justly observes, would be impossible, without supposing in the triangle that _expansive nisus_, discovered by Blumenbach, and improved by Darwin, which is peculiar to animated matter, and which alone explains the whole mystery of organization. Our enchanter sits on the ground, with his heels stretched out, his head erect, his wand (or _hypothenuse_) resting on the extremities of his feet and the tip of his nose (as is finely expressed in the engraving in the original work), and revolves upon his bottom with great velocity. His skin, by magical means, has acquired an indefinite power of expansion, as well as that of assimilating to itself all the _azote_ of the air, which he decomposes by expiration from his lungs—an immense quantity, and which, in our present unimproved and uneconomical mode of breathing, is quite thrown away. By this simple process the transformation is very naturally accounted for. Footnote 228: Ver. 104. _Phœnician Cone_—It was under this shape that Venus was worshipped in Phœnicia. Mr. HIGGINS thinks it was the _Venus Urania_, or Celestial Venus; in allusion to which, the Phœnician grocers first introduced the practice of preserving sugar-loaves in blue or sky-coloured paper—he also believes that the _conical_ form of the original grenadier’s cap was typical of the loves of Mars and Venus. Footnote 229: Ver. 107. _Parabola_—The curve described by projectiles of all sorts, as bombs, shuttlecocks, &c. Footnote 230: Ver. 115. Hyperbola—Not figuratively speaking, as in rhetoric, but mathematically; and therefore blue-eyed. Footnote 231: Ver. 122. _Asymptotes_—“Lines, which though they may approach still nearer together till they are nearer than the least assignable distance, yet being still produced infinitely, will never meet”.—_Johnson’s Dictionary._ Footnote 232: Ver. 124. _Ellipsis_—A curve, the revolution of which on its axis produces an ellipsoid, or solid resembling the eggs of birds, particularly those of the gallinaceous tribe. _Ellipsis_ is the only curve that embraces the cone. Footnote 233: [“Romantic Ashbourn.” The road down Ashbourn Hill winds in front of Ashbourn Hall, then the residence of the Rev. Mr. Leigh, who married a relation of CANNING’S, and to whom the latter was a frequent visitor. A clever parodical application of this couplet was made by O’CONNELL to LORD STANLEY’S section of a party of six, who wished to hold the balance of power, during PEEL’S short administration in 1835. He altered it to “The Derby Dilly,” carrying _six_ insides.—See the Greville Memoirs, vol. 3, pp. 236, &c.—ED.] Footnote 234: [Thus sings Dr. Darwin of the Loves of the Plants: