"Abbott, Edwin A - Flatland" - читать интересную книгу автора (Abbott Edwin A)

friendship. Especially is this true among the lower classes of the
Triangles. With them, the eye is situated so far from their vertex
that they can scarcely take cognizance of what goes on at that
extremity of their frame. They are, moreover, of a rough coarse
nature, not sensitive to the delicate touch of the highly organized
Polygon. What wonder then if an involuntary toss of the head has ere
now deprived the State of a valuable life!
I have heard that my excellent Grandfather -- one of the least
irregular of his unhappy Isosceles class, who indeed obtained, shortly
before his decease, four out of seven botes from the Sanitary and
Social Board for passing him into the class of the Equal-sided --
often deplored, with a tear in his venerable eye, a miscarriage of
this kind, which had occured to his great-great-great-Grandfather, a
respectable Working Man with an angle or brain of 59 degrees 30
minutes. According to his account, my unfortunately Ancestor, being
afflicted with rheumatism, and in the act of being felt by a Polygon,
by one sudden start accidentally transfixed the Great Man through the
diagonal and thereby, partly in consequence of his long imprisonment
and degradation, and partly because of the moral shock which pervaded
the whole of my Ancestor's relations, threw back our family a degree
and a half in their ascent towards better things. The result was that
in the next generation the family brain was registered at only 58
degrees, and not till the lapse of five generations was the lost
ground recovered, the full 60 degrees attained, and the Ascent from
the Isosceles finally achieved. And all this series of calamaties
from one little accident in the process of Feeling.
As this point I think I hear some of my better educated readers
exclaim, "How could you in Flatland know anything about angles and
degrees, or minutes? We _see_ an angle, because we, in the region of
Space, can see two straight lines inclined to one another; but you,
who can see nothing but on straight line at a time, or at all events
onlly a number of bits of straight lines all in one straight line, --
how can you ever discern an angle, and much less register angles of
different sizes?"
I answer that though we cannot _see- angles, we can _infer_ them,
and this with great precision. Our sense of touch, stimulated by
necessity, and developed by long training, enables us to distinguish
angles far more accurately than your sense of sight, when unaided by a
rule or measure of angles. nor must I omit to explain that we have
great natural helps. It is with us a Law of Nature that the brain of
the Isosceles class shall begin at half a degree, or thirty minutes,
and shall increase (if it increases at all) by half a degree in every
generation until the goal of 60 degrees is reached, when the condition
of serfdom is quitted, and the freeman enters the class of Regulars.
Consequently, Nature herself supplies us with an ascending scale
or Alphabet of angles for half a degree up to 60 degrees, Specimen of
which are placed in every Elementary School throughout the land.
Owing to occasional retrogressions, to still more frequent moral and
intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the
Criminal and Vagabond classes, there is always a vast superfluity of