I own to a prodigious respect, entertained since my Sophomore year at the University, for those collegiate youth whose terribly hard study of Bourdon and Legendre seems to have such a mollifying effect upon their heads,--but, as the tradesmen say, that thing is "not in my line." I would rather have a bundle of bad verses which have been consigned to the pastry-cook. I suppose--for I have been told so upon good authority --that, if "equals be taken from equals, the remainders are equal." I do not see why they should not be, and, as a citizen of the United States of America, the axiom seems to me to be entitled to respect. When a youthful person, with a piece of chalk in his hand, before commencing his artistic and scientific achievements upon the black-board, says: "Let it be granted that a straight line may be drawn from any one point to any other point," I invariably answer, "Of course,--by all manner of means,"--although you know, dear Don, that, if I should put him upon mathematical proof of the postulate, I might bother him hugely. But when we come to the Fourteenth Proposition of Euclid's Data,--when I am required to admit, that, "if a magnitude together with a given magnitude has a given ratio to another magnitude, the excess of this other magnitude above a given magnitude has a given ratio to the first magnitude; and if the excess of a magnitude above a given magnitude has a given ratio to another magnitude, this other magnitude together with a given ratio to the first magnitude,"--I own to a slight confusion of my intellectual faculties, and a perfect contempt for John Buteo and Ptolemy. Then, there is Butler's "Analogy"; an excellent work it is, I have been told,--a charming work to master,--quite a bulwark of our faith; but as, in my growing days, it was explained to me, or rather was not explained, before breakfast, by a truculent Doctor of Divinity, whom I knew to be ugly and felt to be great, of course, the good Bishop and I are not upon the best of terms.