Introduction & Dedication

INTRODUCTION

 “Parallax,” the Founder of the Zetetic Philosophy, is dead; and it now becomes the duty of those, especially, who knew him personally and who labored with him in the cause of Truth against Error, to begin, anew, the work which is left in their hands. Dr. Samuel B. Rowbotham finished his earthly labours, in England, the country of his birth, December 23, 1884, at the age of 89. He was, certainly, one of the most gifted of men: and though his labours as a public lecturer were confined within the limits of the British Islands his published work is known all over the world and is destined to live and be republished when books on the now popular system of philosophy will be considered in no other light than as bundles of waste paper. For several years did “Parallax” spread a knowledge of the facts which form the basis of his system without the slightest recognition from the newspaper press until, in January, 1849, the people were informed by the “Wilts Independent” that lectures had been delivered by “a gentleman adopting the name of ‘Parallax,’ to prove modern astronomy unreasonable and contradictory,” that “great skill” was shown by the lecturer, and that he proved himself to be “thoroughly acquainted with the subject in all its bearings.” Such was the beginning—the end will not be so easily described. The Truth will always find advocates—men who care not a snap of their fingers for the mere opinion of the world, whatever form it may take, whilst they know that they are the masters of the situation and that Reason is King! In 1867, “Parallax” was described as “a paragon of courtesy, good temper, and masterly skill in debate.” The author of the following hastily-gotten-up pages is proud of having spent many a pleasant hour in the company of Samuel Birley Rowbotham.

 A complete sketch of the “Zetetic Philosophy” is impossible in a small pamphlet; and many things necessarily remain unsaid which, perhaps, should have been touched upon, but which would to some extent have interfered with the plan laid down—the bringing together, in a concise form, “One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe.” Much may be gathered, indirectly, from the arguments in these pages, as to the real nature of the Earth on which we live and of the heavenly bodies which were created FOR US. The reader is requested to be patient in this matter and not expect a whole flood of light to burst in upon him at once, through the dense clouds of opposition and prejudice which hang all around. Old ideas have to be gotten rid of, by some people, before they can entertain the new; and this will especially be the case in the matter of the Sun, about which we are taught, by Mr. Proctor, as follows: “The globe of the Sun is so much larger than that of the Earth that no less than 1,250,000 globes as large as the Earth would be wanted to make up together a globe as large as the Sun.” Whereas, we know that, as it is demonstrated that the Sun moves round over the Earth, its size is proportionately less. We can then easily understand that Day and Night, and the Seasons are brought about by his daily circuits round in a course concentric with the North, diminishing in their extent to the end of June, and increasing until the end of December, the equatorial region being the area covered by the Sun’s mean motion. If, then, these pages serve but to arouse the spirit of enquiry, the author will be satisfied. The right hand of fellowship in this good work is extended, in turn, to Mr. J. Lindgren, 90 South First Street, Brooklyn, E. D., N. Y., Mr. M. C. Flanders, lecturer, Kendall, Orleans County, N. Y., and to Mr. John Hampden, editor of “Parallax” (a new journal), Cosmos House, Balham, Surrey, England.

DEDICATED TO RICHARD A. PROCTOR, ESQ.
“THE GREATEST ASTRONOMER OF THE AGE.”

 If man uses the senses which God has given him, he gains knowledge; if he uses them not, he remains ignorant. Mr. R. A. Proctor, who has been called “the greatest astronomer of the age,” says: “The Earth on which we live and move seems to be flat.” Now, he does not mean that it seems to be flat to the man who shuts his eyes in the face of nature, or, who is not in the full possession of his senses: no, but to the average, common sense, wide-awake, thinking man. He continues: “that is, though there are hills and valleys on its surface, yet it seems to extend on all sides in one and the same general level.” Again, he says: “There seems nothing to prevent us from travelling as far as we please in any direction towards the circle all round us, called the horizon, where the sky seems to meet the level of the Earth.” “The level of the Earth!” Mr. Proctor knows right well what he is talking about, for the book from which we take his words, “Lessons in Elementary Astronomy,” was written, he tells us, “to guard the beginner against the captious objections which have from time to time been urged against accepted astronomical theories.” The things which are to be defended, then, are these “accepted astronomical theories!” It is not truth that is to be defended against the assaults of error—Oh, no: simply “theories,” right or wrong, because they have been “accepted!” Accepted! Why, they have been accepted because it was not thought to be worth while to look at them. Sir John Herschel says: “We shall take for granted, from the outset, the Copernican system of the world.” He did not care whether it was the right system or a wrong one, or he would not have done that: he would have looked into it. But, forsooth, the theories are accepted, and, of course, the men who have accepted them are the men who will naturally defend them if they can. So, Richard A. Proctor tries his hand; and we shall see how it fails him. His book was published without any date to it at all. But there is internal evidence which will fix that matter closely enough. We read of the carrying out of the experiments of the celebrated scientist, Alfred R. Wallace, to prove the “convexity” of the surface of standing water, which experiments were conducted in March, 1870, for the purpose of winning Five Hundred Pounds from John Hampden, Esq., of Swindon, England, who had wagered that sum upon the conviction that the said surface is always a level one. Mr. Proctor says: “The experiment was lately tried in a very amusing way.” In or about the year 1870, then, Mr. Proctor wrote his book; and, instead of being ignorant of the details of the experiment, he knew all about them. And whether the “amusing” part of the business was the fact that Mr. Wallace wrongfully claimed the five-hundred pounds and got it, or that Mr. Hampden was the victim of the false claim, it is hard to say. The “way” in which the experiment was carried out is, to all intents and purposes, just the way in which Mr. Proctor states that it “can be tried.” He says, however, that the distance involved in the experiment “should be three or four miles.” Now, Mr. Wallace took up six miles in his experiment, and was unable to prove that there is any “curvature,” though he claimed the money and got it; surely it would be “amusing” for anyone to expect to be able to show the “curvature of the earth” in three or four miles, as Mr. Proctor suggests! Nay, it is ridiculous. But “the greatest astronomer of the age” says the thing can be done! And he gives a diagram: “Showing how the roundness of the Earth can be proved by means of three boats on a large sheet of water.” (Three or four miles.) But, though the accepted astronomical theories be scattered to the winds, we charge Mr. Proctor either that he has never made the experiment with the three boats, or, that, if he has, the experiment did NOT prove what he says it will. Accepted theories, indeed! Are they to be bolstered up with absurdity and falsehood? Why, if it were possible to show the two ends of a four-mile stretch of water to be on a level, with the centre portion of that water bulged up, the surface of the Earth would be a series of four-mile curves!

 But Mr. Proctor says: “We can set three boats in a line on the water, as at A, B, and C, (Fig. 7). Then, if equal masts are placed in these boats, and we place a telescope, as shown, so that when we look through it we see the tops of the masts of A and C, we find the top of the mast B is above the line of sight.” Now, here is the point: Mr. Proctor either knows or he ought to know that we shall NOT find anything of the sort! If he has ever tried the experiment, he knows that the three masts will range in a straight line, just as common sense tells us they will. If he has not tried the experiment, he should have tried it, or have paid attention to the details of experiments by those who have tried similar ones a score of times and again. Mr. Proctor may take either horn of the dilemma he pleases: he is just as wrong as a man can be, either way. He mentions no names, but he says: “A person had written a book, in which he said that he had tried such an experiment as the above, and had found that the surface of the water was not curved.” That person was “Parallax,” the founder of the Zetetic Philosophy. He continues: “Another person seems to have believed the first, and became so certain that the Earth is flat as to wager a large sum of money that if three boats were placed as in Fig. 7, the middle one would not be above the line joining the two others.” That person was John Hampden. And, says Mr. Proctor, “Unfortunately for him, some one who had more sense agreed to take his wager, and, of course, won his money.” Now, the “some one who had more sense” was Mr. Wallace. And, says Proctor, in continuation: “He [Hampden?] was rather angry; and it is a strange thing that he was not angry with himself for being so foolish, or with the person who said he had tried the experiment (and so led him astray), but with the person who had won his money!” Here, then, we see that Mr. Proctor knows better than to say that the experiments conducted by “Parallax” were things of the imagination only, or that a wrong account had been given of them; and it would be well if he knew better than to try to make his readers believe that either one or the other of these things is the fact: But, there is the Old Bedford Canal now; and there are ten thousand places where the experiment may be tried! Who, then, are the “foolish” people: those who “believe” the record of experiments made by searchers after Truth, or those who shut their eyes to them, throw a doubt upon the record, charge the conductors of the experiments with dishonesty, never conduct similar experiments themselves, and declare the result of such experiments to be so and so, when the declaration can be proved to be false by any man, with a telescope, in twenty-four hours?

 Mr. Proctor:—The sphericity of the Earth CANNOT be proved in the way in which you tell us it “can” be! We tell you to take back your words and remodel them on the basis of Truth. Such careless misrepresentations of facts are a disgrace to science—they are the disgrace of theoretical science to-day! Mr. Blackie, in his work on “Self Culture,” says: “All flimsy, shallow, and superficial work, in fact, is a lie, of which a man ought to be ashamed.”

 That the Earth is an extended plane, stretched out in all directions away from the central North, over which hangs, for ever, the North Star, is a fact which all the falsehoods that can be brought to bear upon it with their dead weight will never overthrow: it is God’s Truth the face of which, however, man has the power to smirch all over with his unclean hands. Mr. Proctor says: “We learn from astronomy that all these ideas, natural though they seem, are mistaken.” Man’s natural ideas and conclusions and experimental results are, then, to be overthrown by—what! By “astronomy?” By a thing without a soul—a mere theoretical abstraction, the outcome of the dreamer? Never! The greatest astronomer of the age is not the man, even, who can so much as attempt to manage the business. “We find,” says Mr. Proctor, “that the Earth is not flat, but a globe; not fixed, but in very rapid motion; not much larger than the moon, and far smaller than the Sun and the greater number of the stars.”

 First, then, Mr. Proctor, tell us HOW you find that the Earth is not flat, but a globe! It does not matter that “we find” it so put down in that conglomeration of suppositions which you seek to defend: the question is, What is the evidence of it?—where can it be obtained? “The Earth on which we live and move seems to be flat,” you tell us: where, then, is the mistake? If the Earth seem to be what it is not, how are we to trust our senses? And if it is said that we cannot do so, are we to believe it, and consent to be put down lower than the brutes? No, sir: we challenge you, as we have done many times before, to produce the slightest evidence of the Earth’s rotundity, from the world of facts around you. You have given to us the statement we have quoted, and we have the right to demand a proof; and if this is not forthcoming, we have before us the duty of denouncing the absurd dogma as worse than an absurdity—as a FRAUD—and as a fraud that flies in the face of divine revelation! Well, then, Mr. Proctor, in demanding a proof of the Earth’s rotundity (or the frank admission of your errors), we are tempted to taunt you as we tell you hat it is utterly out of your power to produce one; and we tell you that you do not dare even to lift up your finger to point us to the so-called proofs in the school-books of the day, for you know the measure of absurdity of which they are composed, and how disgraceful it is to allow them to remain as false guides of the youthful mind!

 Mr. Proctor: we charge you that, whilst you teach the theory of the Earth’s rotundity and mobility, you KNOW that it is a plane; and here is the ground of the charge. In page 7, in your book, you give a diagram of the “surface on which we live,” and the “supposed globe”—the supposed “hollow globe”—of the heavens, arched over the said surface. Now, Mr. Proctor, you picture the surface on which we live in exact accordance with your verbal description. And what is that description? We shall scarcely be believed when we say that we give it just as it stands: “The level of the surface on which we live.” And, that there may be no mistake about the meaning of the word “level,” we remind you that your diagram proves that the level that you mean is the level of the mechanic, a plane surface, and not the “level” of the astronomer, which is a convex surface! In short, your description of the Earth is exactly what you say it “seems to be,” and, yet, what you say it is not: the very aim of your book being to say so! And we call this the prostitution of the printing press. And it is all the evidence that is necessary to bring the charge home to you, since the words and the diagram are in page 7 of your own book. You know, then, that Earth is a Plane—and so do we.

 Now for the evidence of this grand fact, that other people may know it as well as you: remembering, from first to last, that you have not dared to bring forward a single item from the mass of evidence which is to be found in the “Zetetic Philosophy,” by “Parallax,” a work the influence of which it was the avowed object of your own book to crush!—except that of the three boats, an experiment which you have never tried, and the result of which has never been known, by anyone who has tried it, to be as you say it is!

T.O.C.
-or-
One Hundred Proofs

Source:
Library of Congress
Control No. 52055019