“ARITHMETICUS.”  Virginia, Nevada.—­“If it would take a cannon-ball 3 and 1/3 seconds to travel four miles, and 3 and 3/8 seconds to travel the next four, and 3 and 5/8 to travel the next four, and if its rate of progress continued to diminish in the same ratio, how long would it take it to go fifteen hundred million miles?”

I don’t know.

“Ambitious learner,” Oakland.—­Yes; you are right America was not discovered by Alexander Selkirk.

“Discarded lover.”—­“I loved, and still love, the beautiful Edwitha Howard, and intended to marry her.  Yet, during my temporary absence at Benicia, last week, alas! she married Jones.  Is my happiness to be thus blasted for life?  Have I no redress?”

Of course you have.  All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side.  The intention and not the act constitutes crime—­in other words, constitutes the deed.  If you call your bosom friend a fool, and intend it for an insult, it is an insult; but if you do it playfully, and meaning no insult, it is not an insult.  If you discharge a pistol accidentally, and kill a man, you can go free, for you have done no murder; but if you try to kill a man, and manifestly intend to kill him, but fail utterly to do it, the law still holds that the intention constituted the crime, and you are guilty of murder.  Ergo, if you had married Edwitha accidentally, and without really intending to do it, you would not actually be married to her at all, because the act of marriage could not be complete without the intention.  And ergo, in the strict spirit of the law, since you deliberately intended to marry Edwitha, and didn’t do it, you are married to her all the same—­because, as I said before, the intention constitutes the crime.  It is as clear as day that Edwitha is your wife, and your redress lies in taking a club and mutilating Jones with it as much as you can.  Any man has a right to protect his own wife from the advances of other men.  But you have another alternative—­you were married to Edwitha first, because of your deliberate intention, and now you can prosecute her for bigamy, in subsequently marrying Jones.  But there is another phase in this complicated case:  You intended to marry Edwitha, and consequently, according to law, she is your wife—­there is no getting around that; but she didn’t marry you, and if she never intended to marry you, you are not her husband, of course.  Ergo, in marrying Jones, she was guilty of bigamy, because she was the wife of another man at the time; which is all very well as far as it goes—­but then, don’t you see, she had no other husband when she married Jones, and consequently she was not guilty of bigamy.  Now, according to this view of the case, Jones married a spinster, who was a widow at the same time and another man’s wife at the same time, and yet who had no husband and never had one, and never had any intention of getting married,