In Laputa, early in the eighteenth century, the people were so engrossed in the mathematics that the constant study of abstruse problems had a strange and distorting effect on the whole life of the island. Their houses were built according to such refined instructions as caused their workmen to make perpetual mistakes; their clothes were cut (and often incorrectly) by mathematical calculation; the very viands on their tables were carved into rhomboids, cycloids, cones, parallelograms, and other mathematical figures! To most Englishmen of that time any attempt to apply science to shipbuilding must have appeared as far-fetched and grotesque as these practices of the Laputans. Ship design was still an art, veiled in mystery, its votaries guided only by blind lore and groping along an increasingly difficult path by processes of trial and error. The methods of applied science were as yet unknown. The builder was often a mere carpenter, ignorant of mathematics and even of the use of simple plans; the savant in his quiet study and the seaman on the perilous seas lived in worlds apart from each other and from him, and could not collaborate. Such speculative principles as the shipbuilder possessed were almost wholly erroneous; no single curve or dimension of a ship, it is said, was founded on a rational principle. Everything was by tradition or authority. Knowledge had not yet coalesced in books. Men kept such secrets as they had in manuscript, and their want of knowledge was covered by silence and mystery. Preposterous theories were maintained by the most able men and facts were denied or perverted so as to square with them. “Forgetful of the road pointed out by Lord Bacon, who opposed a legitimate induction from well-established facts to hypothesis founded on specious conjectures, and too hastily giving up as hopeless the attainment of a theory combining experiment with established scientific principles, they have contented themselves with ingeniously inventing _mechanical methods_ of forming the designs of ships’ bodies of arcs of circles, others of ellipses, parabolas, catenaries--which they thought to possess some peculiar virtue and which they investigated with the minutest mathematical accuracy. So they became possessed of a System. And, armed with this, they despised all rivals without one; and, trusting to it, rejected all the benefits of experiment and of sea experience.”[20]