“There is a kind of Cabbala Alphabetica which the investigators of the numerals in words would do well to take up; it is the formation of sentences which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only once.  No one has done it with v and j treated as consonants; but you and I can do it.  Dr. Whewell and I amused ourselves some years ago with attempts.  He could not make sense, though he joined words he gave me Phiz, styx, wrong, buck, flame, quiz.

“I gave him the following, which he agreed was ’admirable sense,’—­I certainly think the words would never have come together except in this way:  I quartz pyx who fling muck beds.  I long thought that no human being could say this under any circumstances.  At last I happened to be reading a religious writer,—­as he thought himself,—­who threw aspersions on his opponents thick and threefold.  Heyday came into my head; this fellow flings muck beds; he must be a quartz pyx.  And then I remembered that a pyx is a sacred vessel, and quartz is a hard stone, as hard as the heart of a religious foe-curser.  So that the line is the motto of the ferocious sectarian who turns his religious vessels into mud-holders, for the benefit of those who will not see what he sees.”

“There are several other sentences given, in which all the letters (except v and j as consonants) are employed, of which the following is the best:  Get nymph; quiz sad brow; fix luck,—­which in more sober English would be, Marry; be cheerful; watch your business.  There is more edification, more religion, in this than in all the 666 interpretations put together.”

There is something very pleasant in the thought of these two sages playing at jackstraws with the letters of the alphabet.  The task which De Morgan and Dr. Whewell, “the omniscient,” set themselves would not be unworthy of our own ingenious scholars, and it might be worth while for some one of our popular periodicals to offer a prize for the best sentence using up the whole alphabet, under the same conditions as those submitted to by our two philosophers.

This whole book of De Morgan’s seems to me full of instruction.  There is too much of it, no doubt; yet one can put up with the redundancy for the sake of the multiplicity of shades of credulity and self-deception it displays in broad daylight.  I suspect many of us are conscious of a second personality in our complex nature, which has many traits resembling those found in the writers of the letters addressed to Mr. De Horgan.

I have not ventured very often nor very deeply into the field of metaphysics, but if I were disposed to make any claim in that direction, it would be the recognition of the squinting brain, the introduction of the term “cerebricity” corresponding to electricity, the idiotic area in the brain or thinking-marrow, and my studies of the second member in the partnership of I-My-Self & Co.  I add the Co. with especial reference to a very interesting article in a late