Part 7 (1/2)
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.