A Nonsense Anthology Part 7

Parallels all things are; yet many of these are askew; You are certainly I; but certainly I am not you.

One, whom we see not, is; and one, who is not, we see; Fiddle, we know, is diddle; and diddle, we take it, is dee.

_A.C. Swinburne_.

DARWINITY

Power to thine elbow, thou newest of sciences, All the old landmarks are ripe for decay; Wars are but shadows, and so are alliances, Darwin the great is the man of the day.

All other 'ologies want an apology; Bread's a mistake--Science offers a stone; Nothing is true but Anthropobiology-- Darwin the great understands it alone.

Mighty the great evolutionist teacher is, Licking Morphology clean into shape; Lord! what an ape the Professor or Preacher is, Ever to doubt his descent from an ape.

Man's an Anthropoid--he cannot help that, you know-- First evoluted from Pongos of old; He's but a branch of the _catarrhine_ cat, you know-- Monkey I mean--that's an ape with a cold.

Fast dying out are man's later Appearances, Cataclysmitic Geologies gone; Now of Creation completed the clearance is, Darwin alone you must anchor upon.

Primitive Life--Organisms were chemical, Busting spontaneous under the sea; Purely subaqueous, panaquademical, Was the original Crystal of Me.

I'm the Apostle of mighty Darwinity, Stands for Divinity--sounds much the same-- Apo-theistico-Pan-Asininity Only can doubt whence the lot of us came.

Down on your knees, Superst.i.tion and Flunkeydom!

Won't you accept such plain doctrines instead?

What is so simple as primitive Monkeydom Born in the sea with a cold in its head?

_Herman Merivale_.

SONG OF THE SCREW

A moving form or rigid ma.s.s, Under whate'er conditions Along successive screws must pa.s.s Between each two positions.

It turns around and slides along-- This is the burden of my song.

The pitch of screw, if multiplied By angle of rotation, Will give the distance it must glide In motion of translation.

Infinite pitch means pure translation, And zero pitch means pure rotation.

Two motions on two given screws, With amplitudes at pleasure, Into a third screw-motion fuse; Whose amplitude we measure By parallelogram construction (A very obvious deduction.)

Its axis cuts the nodal line Which to both screws is normal, And generates a form divine, Whose name, in language formal, Is "surface-ruled of third degree."

Cylindroid is the name for me.

Rotation round a given line Is like a force along.

If to say couple you incline, You're clearly in the wrong;-- 'Tis obvious, upon reflection, A line is not a mere direction.

So couples with translations too In all respects agree; And thus there centres in the screw A wondrous harmony Of Kinematics and of Statics,-- The sweetest thing in mathematics.

The forces on one given screw, With motion on a second, In general some work will do, Whose magnitude is reckoned By angle, force, and what we call The coefficient virtual.

Rotation now to force convert, And force into rotation; Unchanged the work, we can a.s.sert, In spite of transformation.

And if two screws no work can claim, Reciprocal will be their name.

Five numbers will a screw define, A s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g motion, six; For four will give the axial line, One more the pitch will fix; And hence we always can contrive One screw reciprocal to five.

Screws--two, three, four or five, combined (No question here of six), Yield other screws which are confined Within one screw complex.

Thus we obtain the clearest notion Of freedom and constraint of motion.

In complex III., three several screws At every point you find, Or if you one direction choose, One screw is to your mind; And complexes of order III.

Their own reciprocals may be.

In IV., wherever you arrive, You find of screws a cone, On every line in complex V.

There is precisely one; At each point of this complex rich, A plane of screws have given pitch.

But time would fail me to discourse Of Order and Degree; Of Impulse, Energy and Force, And Reciprocity.

All these and more, for motions small, Have been discussed by Dr. Ball.

_Anonymous_.

MOORLANDS OF THE NOT

Across the moorlands of the Not We chase the gruesome When; And hunt the Itness of the What Through forests of the Then.

Into the Inner Consciousness We track the crafty Where; We spear the Ego tough, and beard The Selfhood in his lair.

With la.s.sos of the brain we catch The Isness of the Was; And in the copses of the Whence We hear the think bees buzz.

We climb the slippery Whichbark tree To watch the Thusness roll And pause betimes in gnostic rimes To woo the Over Soul.

_Anonymous_.

METAPHYSICS

Why and Wherefore set out one day To hunt for a wild Negation.

They agreed to meet at a cool retreat On the Point of Interrogation.

But the night was dark and they missed their mark, And, driven well-nigh to distraction, They lost their ways in a murky maze Of utter abstruse abstraction.

Then they took a boat and were soon afloat On a sea of Speculation, But the sea grew rough, and their boat, though tough, Was split into an Equation.

As they floundered about in the waves of doubt Rose a fearful Hypothesis, Who gibbered with glee as they sank in the sea, And the last they saw was this: