The writer of the _Daily News_ article above referred to very charitably suggests that Sir W. Thomson may be “poking fun at some of his colleagues,” and compares the moss-grown meteorite hypothesis with the Hindoo parable which explains the stability of the earth by stating that it stands on the back of a monster tortoise, that the tortoise rests upon the back of a gigantic elephant, which stands upon the shell of a still bigger tortoise, resting on the back of another still more gigantic elephant, and so on. Sir W. Thomson, of course, requires to smash two more worlds in order to provide a moss-grown fragment for starting the life upon the world which was broken up for our benefit, and so on backwards _ad infinitum_. WORLD-SMASHING. Sir W. Thomson’s moss-grown fragment of a shattered world is not yet forgotten. In the current number of the _Cornhill Magazine_ (January, 1872) it is very severely handled; the more severely, because the writer, though treating the subject quite popularly, shows the fallacy of the hypothesis, even when regarded from the point of view of Sir W. Thomson’s own special department of study. That an eminent mathematician should make a great slip when he ventures upon geological or physiological ground is not at all surprising; it is, in fact, quite to be expected, as there can be no doubt that the close study of _pure_ mathematics, by directing the mind to processes of calculation rather than to phenomena, induces that sublime indifference to facts which has characterized the purely mathematical intellect of all ages. It is not surprising that a philosopher who has been engaged in measuring the imaginary diameter, describing the imaginary oscillations and gyrations of imaginary atoms, and the still more complex imaginary behavior of the imaginary constituents of the imaginary atmospheres by which the mathematical imagination has surrounded these imaginary atoms, should overlook the vulgar fact that neither mosses nor other vegetables, nor even their seeds, can possibly retain their vitality when alternately exposed to the temperature of a blast furnace, and that of two or three hundred degrees below the freezing point; but it is rather surprising that the purely mathematical basis of this very original hypothesis of so great a mathematician should be mathematically fallacious—in plain language, a mathematical blunder.