It ought not, said they. The more curious and intimate inquirers after nature and her doings, though they went hand in hand a good way together, yet they all divided about the nose at last, almost as much as the Faculty itself. They amicably laid it down, that there was a just and geometrical arrangement and proportion of the several parts of the human frame to its several destinations, offices, and functions, which could not be transgressed but within certain limits—that nature, though she sported——she sported within a certain circle;—and they could not agree about the diameter of it. The logicians stuck much closer to the point before them than any of the classes of the literati;——they began and ended with the word Nose; and had it not been for a _petitio principii_, which one of the ablest of them ran his head against in the beginning of the combat, the whole controversy had been settled at once. A nose, argued the logician, cannot bleed without blood—and not only blood—but blood circulating in it to supply the phænomenon with a succession of drops—(a stream being but a quicker succession of drops, that is included, said he.)——Now death, continued the logician, being nothing but the stagnation of the blood—— I deny the definition——Death is the separation of the soul from the body, said his antagonist——Then we don’t agree about our weapons, said the logician—Then there is an end of the dispute, replied the antagonist. The civilians were still more concise: what they offered being more in the nature of a decree——than a dispute. Such a monstrous nose, said they, had it been a true nose, could not possibly have been suffered in civil society——and if false—to impose upon society with such false signs and tokens, was a still greater violation of its rights, and must have had still less mercy shewn it. The only objection to this was, that if it proved any thing, it proved the stranger’s nose was neither true nor false. This left room for the controversy to go on. It was maintained by the advocates of the ecclesiastic court, that there was nothing to inhibit a decree, since the stranger _ex mero motu_ had confessed he had been at the Promontory of Noses, and had got one of the goodliest, &c. &c.——To this it was answered, it was impossible there should be such a place as the Promontory of Noses, and the learned be ignorant where it lay. The commissary of the bishop of _Strasburg_ undertook the advocates, explained this matter in a treatise upon proverbial phrases, shewing them, that the Promontory of Noses was a mere allegorick expression, importing no more than that nature had given him a long nose: in proof of which, with great learning, he cited the underwritten authorities,[11] which had decided the point incontestably, had it not appeared that a dispute about some franchises of dean and chapter-lands had been determined by it nineteen years before.