Let me
say rather it WOULD be difficult: for, as I have shown above,
Recognition by Feeling is unknown among the highest society,
and to FEEL a Circle would be considered a most audacious insult.
This habit of abstention from Feeling in the best society enables
a Circle the more easily to sustain the veil of mystery in which,
from his earliest years, he is wont to enwrap the exact nature of his
Perimeter or Circumference. Three feet being the average Perimeter
it follows that, in a Polygon of three hundred sides each side will
be no more than the hundredth part of a foot in length, or little more
than the tenth part of an inch; and in a Polygon of six or seven hundred
sides the sides are little larger than the diameter of a Spaceland pin-head.
It is always assumed, by courtesy, that the Chief Circle for the time being
has ten thousand sides.
The ascent of the posterity of the Circles in the social scale is
not restricted, as it is among the lower Regular classes, by the Law
of Nature which limits the increase of sides to one in each generation.
If it were so, the number of sides in the Circle would be a mere question
of pedigree and arithmetic, and the four hundred and ninety-seventh
descendant of an Equilateral Triangle would necessarily be a polygon
with five hundred sides.
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