 Part 1. Sections 1 to 3 of Flatland. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Golding. Flatland. A romance of many dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott. To the inhabitants of space in general, and HC in particular, this work is dedicated by a humble native of Flatland, in the hope that even as he was initiated into the mysteries of three dimensions, having been previously conversant with only two, so the citizens of that celestial region may aspire yet higher and higher to the secrets of four, five or even six dimensions, thereby contributing to the enlargement of the imagination and the possible development of that most rare and excellent gift of modesty among the superior races of solid humanity. Part 1. This World. Be patient for the world is broad and wide. Section 1. Of the Nature of Flatland. I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in space. Imagine a vast sheet of paper, on which straight lines, triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, much like shadows, only hard and with luminous edges, and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago I should have said my universe, but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things. In such a country, you will perceive at once that it is impossible that there should be anything of what you call a solid kind. But I dare say you will suppose that we could at least distinguish by sight, the triangles, squares and other figures moving about as I have described them. On the contrary, we could see nothing of the kind, not at least so as to distinguish one figure from another. Nothing was visible, nor could be visible to us, except straight lines, and the necessity of this I will speedily demonstrate. Place a penny on the middle of one of your tables in space, and leaning over it, look down upon it, it will appear a circle. But now, drawing back to the edge of the table, gradually lower your eye, thus bringing yourself more and more into the condition of the inhabitants of Flatland, and you will find the penny becoming more and more oval to your view, and at last, when you have placed your eye exactly on the edge of the table, so that you are, as it were, actually a Flatland citizen, the penny will then have ceased to appear oval at all, and will have become, so far as you can see, a straight line. The same thing would happen if you were to treat in the same way a triangle or square or any other figure cut out of pasteboard. As soon as you look at it with your eye on the edge of the table, you will find that it ceases to appear to you a figure, and that it becomes, in appearance, a straight line. Take, for example, an equilateral triangle, who represents with us a tradesman of the respectable class. Figure one represents the tradesman as you would see him while you were bending over him from above. Reader's note. Figure one is a downward-pointing triangle with all sides equal. End of Reader's note. Figures two and three represent the tradesman as you would see him if your eye were close to the level, or all but on the level of the table. Reader's note. Figure two shares a much flatter downward-pointing triangle with the top edge much longer than the other two sides, which are of equal length. Figure three is flatter still, barely identifiable as a triangle at all. End of Reader's note. And if your eye were quite on the level of the table, and that is how we see him in flat land, you would see nothing but a straight line. When I was in space-land, I heard that your sailors have very similar experiences while they traverse your seas and discern some distant island or coast lying on the horizon. The far-off land may have bays, fallents, angles in and out to any number and extent, yet at a distance you see none of these, unless indeed your sun shines bright upon them, revealing the projections and retirements by means of light and shade. Nothing but a grey, unbroken line upon the water. Well, that is just what we see when one of our triangular or other acquaintances comes towards us in flat land. As there is neither sun with us nor any light of such a kind as to make shadows, we have none of the helps to the sight that you have in space-land. If our friend comes close to us, we see his line becomes larger. If he leaves us, it becomes smaller, but still he looks like a straight line, be he a triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, circle, what you will. A straight line he looks and nothing else. You may perhaps ask how, under these disadvantageous circumstances, we are able to distinguish our friends from one another. But the answer to this very natural question will be more thickly and easily given when I come to describe the inhabitants of flat land. For the present, let me defer this subject and say a word or two about the climate and houses in our country. Section 2 of the Climate and Houses in Flatland As with you, so also with us, there are four points of the compass north, south, east and west. There being no sun nor other heavenly bodies, it is impossible for us to determine the north in the usual way, but we have a method of our own. By a law of nature with us, there is a constant attraction to the south, and although in temperate climates this is very slight, so that even a woman in reasonable health can journey several furlongs northward without much difficulty, yet the hampering effect of the southward attraction is quite sufficient to serve as a compass in most parts of our earth. Moreover, the rain, which falls at stated intervals coming always from the north, is an additional assistance, and in the towns we have the guidance of the houses, which of course have their sidewalls running for the most part north and south, so that the roofs may keep off the rain from the north. In the country where there are no houses, the trunks of the trees serve as some sort of guide. Altogether we have not so much difficulty as might be expected in determining our bearings. Yet in our more temperate regions, in which the southward attraction is hardly felt, walking sometimes in a perfectly desolate plain where there have been no houses nor trees to guide me, I have been occasionally compelled to remain stationary for hours together, waiting till the rain came before continuing my journey. On the weakened aged, and especially on delicate females, the force of attraction tells much more heavily than on the robust of the male sex, so that it is a point of breeding, if you meet a lady in the street, always to give her the north side of the way. By no means an easy thing to do always at short notice when you are in rude health, and in a climate where it is difficult to tell your north from your south. Windows there are none in our houses, for the light comes to us alike in our homes and out of them by day and by night, equally at all times and in all places, quents we know not. It was in old days with our learned men an interesting and often-investigated question what is the origin of light, and the solution of it has been repeatedly attempted, with no other result than to crowd our lunatic asylums with the would-be solvers. Hence, after fruitless attempts to suppress such investigations indirectly by making them liable to a heavy tax, the legislature, in comparatively recent times, absolutely prohibited them. I, alas, I alone in flatland, know now only too well the true solution of this mysterious problem, but my knowledge cannot be made intelligible to a single one of my countrymen, and I am mocked at, I, the sole possessor of the truths of space, and of the theory of the introduction of light from the world of three dimensions, as if I were the maddest of the mad. But a truce to these painful digressions let me return to our houses. The most common form for the construction of a house is five-sided or pentagonal, as in the annexed figure. Reader's Note The figure shows a pentagon slightly skewed to the right, with two sides marked RO and OF, forming a point marked O to the north. The left or western side which has a large opening marked men's door is marked AR. The right or eastern side which has a small opening marked women's door is marked BF. The base or southern side is marked AB. End of Reader's Note The two northern sides RO, OF, constitute the roof, and for the most part have no doors. On the east is a small door for the women, on the west a much larger one for the men. The south side or floor is usually doorless. Square and triangular houses are not allowed, and for this reason the angles of a square and still more those of an equilateral triangle being much more pointed than those of a pentagon and the lines of inanimate objects such as houses being dimmer than the lines of men and women it follows that there is no little danger lest the points of a square or triangular house residents might do serious injury to an inconsiderate or perhaps absent-minded traveller suddenly running against them. And therefore as early as the eleventh century of our era triangular houses were universally forbidden by law the only exceptions being fortifications, powder magazines, barracks and other state buildings which it is not desirable that the general public should approach without circumspection. At this period square houses were still everywhere permitted, though discouraged by a special tax. But about three centuries afterwards the law decided that in all towns containing a population above ten thousand the angle of a pentagon was the smallest house angle that could be allowed consistently with the public safety. The good sense of the community has seconded the efforts of the legislature and now even in the country the pentagonal construction has superseded every other. It is only now and then in some very remote and backward agricultural district that an antiquarian may still discover a square house. Section 3 concerning the inhabitants of Flatland The greatest length or breadth of a full-grown inhabitant of Flatland may be estimated at about eleven of your inches twelve inches may be regarded as a maximum. Our women are straight lines. Our soldiers and glowest classes of workmen are triangles with two equal sides each about eleven inches long and a base or third side so short often not exceeding half an inch that they form at their vertices a very sharp and formidable angle. Indeed when their bases are of the most degraded type not more than the eighth part of an inch in size they can hardly be distinguished from straight lines or women so extremely pointed are their vertices. With us as with you these triangles are distinguished from others by being called isosceles and by this name I shall refer to them in the following pages. Our middle class consists of equilateral or equal-sided triangles. Our professional men and gentlemen are squares to which class I myself belong and five-sided figures or pentagons. Next above these come the nobility of whom there are several degrees beginning at six-sided figures or hexagons and from thence rising in the number of their sides till they receive the honourable title of polygonal or many-sided. Finally when the number of the sides becomes so numerous and the sides themselves so small that the figure cannot be distinguished from a circle he is included in the circular or priestly order and this is the highest class of all. It is a law of nature with us that a male child shall have one more side than his father so that each generation shall rise as a rule one step in the scale of development and nobility. Thus the son of a square is a pentagon, the son of a pentagon, a hexagon and so on. But this rule applies not always to the tradesmen and still less often to the soldiers and to the workmen who indeed can hardly be said to deserve the name of human figures since they have not all their sides equal. With them therefore the law of nature does not hold and the son of an isosceles, i.e. a triangle with two sides equal, remains isosceles still. Nevertheless all hope is not shut out even from the isosceles that his posterity may ultimately rise above his degraded condition. For after a long series of military successes or diligent and skillful labours it is generally found that the more intelligent among the artisan and soldier classes manifest a slight increase of their third side or base and a shrinkage of the two other sides. Intermarriages arranged by the priests between the sons and daughters of these more intellectual members of the lower classes generally result in an offspring approximating still more to the type of the equal-sided triangle. Rarely in proportion to the vast number of isosceles births is a genuine and certifiable equal-sided triangle produced from isosceles parents. Footnote. What need of a certificate a Spaceland critic may ask is not the procreation of a square son a certificate from nature herself proving the equal-sidedness of the father? I reply that no lady of any position will marry an uncertified triangle. Square offspring has sometimes resulted from a slightly irregular triangle but in almost every such case the irregularity of the first generation is visited on the third which either fails to attain the pentagonal rank or relapses to the triangular. End of footnote. Such a birth requires, as its antecedents, not only a series of carefully arranged intermarriages but also a long continued exercise of frugality and self-control on the part of the would-be ancestors of the coming equilateral and a patient systematic and continuous development of the isosceles intellect through many generations. The birth of a true equilateral triangle from isosceles parents is the subject of rejoicing in our country for many furlongs round. After a strict examination conducted by the sanitary and social board the infant, if certified as regular, is with solemn ceremonial admitted into the class of equilaterals. He is then immediately taken from his proud yet sorrowing parents and adopted by some childless equilateral who is bound by oath never to permit the child henceforth to enter his former home or so much as to look upon his relations again for fear lest the freshly developed organism may, by force of unconscious imitation fall back again into his hereditary level. The occasional emergence of an isosceles from the ranks of his serf-born ancestors is welcomed not only by the poor serfs themselves as a gleam of light and hope shared upon the monotonous squalor of their existence but also by the aristocracy at large. For all the higher classes are well aware that these rare phenomena while they do little or nothing to vulgarize their own privileges serve as a most useful barrier against revolution from below. Had the acute-angled rabble been all without exception absolutely destitute of hope and of ambition they might have found leaders in some of their many seditious outbreaks so able as to render their superior numbers and strength too much even for the wisdom of the circles. But a wise ordinance of nature has decreed that in proportion as the working classes increase in intelligence, knowledge, and all virtue in that same proportion their acute angle which makes them physically terrible shall increase also and approximate to the harmless angle of the equilateral triangle. Thus in the most brutal and formidable of the soldier-class creatures almost on a level with women in their lack of intelligence it is found that as they wax in the mental ability necessary to employ their tremendous penetrating power to advantage so do they wane in the power of penetration itself. How admirable is this law of compensation and how perfect a proof of the natural fitness and I may almost say the divine origin of the aristocratic constitution of the states in flatland. By a judicious use of this law of nature the polygons and circles are almost always able to stifle sedition in its very cradle giving advantage of the irrepressible and boundless hopefulness of the human mind. Art also comes to the aid of law and order. It is generally found possible by a little artificial compression or expansion on the part of the state physicians to make some of the more intelligent leaders of a rebellion perfectly regular and to admit them at once to the privileged classes. A much larger number who are still below the standard allured by the prospect of being ultimately ennobled are induced to enter the state hospitals where they are kept in honourable confinement for life. One or two alone of the more obstinate, foolish and hopelessly irregular are led to execution. All of the isosceles, planless and leaderless are either transfixed without resistance by the small body of their brethren whom the chief circle keeps in pay for emergencies of this kind or else more often by means of jealousies and suspicions skillfully fermented among them by the circular party they are stirred to mutual warfare and perished by one another's angles. Less than 120 rebellions are recorded in our annals besides minor outbreaks numbered at 235 and they have all ended thus. End of Part 1, Section 3, Recording by Ruth Golding Part 1, sections 4 to 5 of Flatland. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Ruth Golding Flatland are romance of many dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott. Part 1, section 4 concerning the women If our highly pointed triangles of the soldier class are formidable it may be readily inferred that far more formidable are our women. For if a soldier is a wedge a woman is a needle, being so to speak at all point, at least at the two extremities. Add to this the power of making herself practically invisible at will, and you will perceive that a female in Flatland is a creature by no means to be trifled with. But here perhaps some of my younger readers may ask how a woman in Flatland can make herself invisible. This ought, I think, to be apparent without any explanation, however a few words will make it clear to the most unreflecting. Place a needle on a table then with your eye on the level of the table look at it sideways and you see the whole length of it. But look at it end ways and you see nothing but a point. It has become practically invisible. Just so is it with one of our women. When her side is turned towards us we see her as a straight line. When the end containing her eye or mouth for with us these two organs are identical is the part that meets our eye then we see nothing but a highly lustrous point. But when the back is presented to our view then being only sub-lustrous and indeed almost as dim as an inanimate object her hindre extremity serves her as a kind of invisible cap. The dangers to which we are exposed from our women must now be manifest to the meanest capacity in space-land. If even the angle of a respectable triangle in the middle class is not without its dangers, if to run against a working man involves a gash, if collision with an officer of the military class necessitates a serious wound, if a mere touch from the vertex of a private soldier brings with it danger of death, what can it be to run against a woman except absolute and immediate destruction. And when a woman is invisible or visible only as a dim sub-lustrous point, how difficult must it be even for the most cautious always to avoid collision. Many are the enactments made at different times in the different states of Flatland in order to minimise this peril. And in the southern and less temperate climates, where the force of gravitation is greater and human beings more liable to casual and involuntary motions, the laws concerning women are naturally much more stringent. But a general view of the code may be obtained from the following summary. One. Every house shall have one entrance in the eastern side for the use of females only, by which all females shall enter in a becoming and respectful manner, and not by the men's or western door. Footnote. When I was in Spaceland I understood that some of your priestly circles have in the same way a separate entrance for villages, farmers, and teachers of board schools. Spectator September 1884, page 1255, that they may approach in a becoming and respectful manner. End of footnote. Two. No female shall walk in any public place without continually keeping up her peace cry under penalty of death. Three. Any female, duly certified to be suffering from St. Bitis's dance, fits, chronic cold accompanied by violent sneezing, or any disease necessitating involuntary motions, shall be instantly destroyed. In some of the states there is an additional law forbidding females under penalty of death from walking or standing in any public place without moving their backs constantly from right to left so as to indicate their presence to those behind them. Others oblige a woman when travelling to be followed by one of her sons or servants or by her husband. Others confine women altogether to their houses except during the religious festivals. But it has been found by the wisest of our circles or statesmen that the multiplication of restrictions on females tends not only to the debilitation and diminution of the race but also to the increase of domestic murders to such an extent that a state loses more than it gains by a too prohibitive code. For whenever the temper of the women is thus exasperated by confinement at home or hampering regulations abroad, they are apt to vent their spleen upon their husbands and children. And in the less temperate climates the whole male population of a village has been sometimes destroyed in one or two hours of simultaneous female outbreak. Hence the three laws mentioned above suffice for the better regulated states and may be accepted as a rough exemplification of our female code. After all our principal safeguard is found not in legislature but in the interests of the women themselves. For although they can inflict instantaneous death by a retrograde movement, yet unless they can at once disengage their stinging extremity from the struggling body of their victim, their own frail bodies are liable to be shattered. The power of fashion is also on our side. I pointed out that in some less civilised states no female is suffered to stand in any public place without swaying her back from right to left. This practice has been universal among ladies of any pretensions to breeding in all well-governed states as far back as the memory of figures can reach. It is considered a disgrace to any state that legislation should have to enforce what ought to be and is in every respectable female a natural instinct. The rhythmical and, if I may say so, well-modulated undulation of the back in our ladies of circular rank is envied and imitated by the wife of a common equilateral who can achieve nothing beyond a mere monotonous swing like the ticking of a pendulum. And the regular tick of the equilateral is no less admired and copied by the wife of the progressive and aspiring isosceles in the females of whose family no back-motion of any kind has become as yet a necessity of life. Hence in every family of position and consideration back-motion is as prevalent as time itself, and the husbands and sons in these households enjoy immunity, at least from invisible attacks. Not that it must be for a moment supposed that our women are destitute of affection, but unfortunately the passion of the moment predominates in the frail sex over every other consideration. This is, of course, a necessity arising from their unfortunate conformation. For as they have no pretensions to an angle, being inferior in this respect to the very lowest of the isosceles, they are consequently wholly devoid of brain power, and have neither reflection judgment nor forethought, and hardly any memory. Hence in their fits of fury they remember no claims and recognize no distinctions. I have actually known a case where a woman has exterminated her whole household, and half an hour afterwards when her rage was over and the fragments swept away has asked what has become of her husband and her children. Obviously, then, a woman is not to be irritated as long as she is in a position where she can turn round. When you have them in their apartments, which are constructed with a view to denying them that power, you can say and do what you like. For they are then wholly impotent for mischief, and will not remember a few minutes hence the incident for which they may be at this moment threatening you with death, nor the promises which you may have found it necessary to make in order to pacify their fury. On the whole we get on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations, except in the lower strata of the military classes. There the want of tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times indescribable disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good sense and seasonable simulations, these reckless creatures too often neglect the prescribed construction of the women's apartments or irritate their wives by ill-advised expressions out of those which they refuse immediately to retract. Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more judicious circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is massacre. Not, however, without its advantages, as it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of the isosceles, by many of our circles, the destructiveness of the thinner sex is regarded as one among many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population and nipping revolution in the bud. Yet even in our best regulated and most approximately circular families I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with you in space-land. There is peace in so far as the absence of slaughter may be called by that name, but there is necessarily little harmony of tastes or pursuits. And the cautious wisdom of the circles has ensured safety at the cost of domestic comfort. In every circular or polygonal household it has been a habit from time immemorial and has now become a kind of distinct among the women of our higher classes that the mothers and daughters should constantly keep their eyes and mouths towards their husband and his male friends. And for a lady in a family of distinction to turn her back upon her husband would be regarded as a kind of portent involving loss of status. But, as I shall soon show, this custom, though it has the degree, is not without its disadvantages. In the house of the working man or respectable tradesman where the wife is allowed to turn her back upon her husband while pursuing her household avocations there are at least intervals of quiet when the wife is neither seen nor heard except for the humming sound of the continuous peace cry. But in the homes of the upper classes there is too often no peace. There the voluble mouth and bright penetrating eye are ever directed towards the master of the household and light itself is not more persistent than the stream of feminine discourse. The tact and skill which suffice to avert a woman's sting are unequal to the task of stopping a woman's mouth. The wife has absolutely nothing to say and absolutely no constraint of wit, sense, or conscience to prevent her from saying it. Not a few cynics have been found to avert that they prefer the danger of the death dealing but inaudible sting to the safe, sonorousness of a woman's other end. To my readers in Spaceland the condition of our women may seem truly deplorable and so indeed it is. A male of the lowest type of the isosceles may look forward to some improvement of his angle and to the ultimate elevation of the whole of his degraded caste. But no woman can entertain such hopes for her sex. Once a woman always a woman is a decree of nature and the very laws of evolution seem suspended in her disfavour. Yet at least we can admire the wise pre-arrangement which has ordained that as they have no hopes so they shall have no memory to recall and no forethought to anticipate the miseries and humiliations which are at once a necessity of their existence and the basis of the constitution of Flatland. Section 5 of our methods of recognising one another. You who are blessed with shade as well as light, you who are gifted with two eyes endowed with a knowledge of perspective and charmed with the enjoyment of various colours, you who can actually see an angle and contemplate the complete circumference of a circle in the happy region of the three dimensions, how shall I make clear to you the dream difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognising one another's configurations. Recall what I told you above. All beings in Flatland, animate or inanimate, no matter what their form, present to our view the same or nearly the same appearance, vis that of a straight line. How then can one be distinguished from another where all appear the same? The answer is threefold. The first means of recognition is the sense of hearing which with us is far more highly developed than with you and which enables us not only to distinguish by the voice our personal friends, but even to discriminate between different classes, at least so far as concerns the three lowest orders, the equilateral, the square and the pentagon for of the isosceles I take no account. But as we ascend in the social scale, the process of discriminating and being discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of voice discrimination is a plebeian virtue not much developed among the aristocracy. And wherever there is any danger of imposture we cannot trust to this method. Amongst our lowest orders the vocal organs are developed to a degree more than correspondent with those of hearing, so that an isosceles can easily feign the voice of a polygon and with some training that of a circle himself. A second method is therefore more commonly resorted to. Feeling is among our women and lower classes, about our upper classes I shall speak presently the principal test of recognition, at all events between strangers, and when the question is not as to the individual, but as to the class. What therefore introduction is among the higher classes in space land, that the process of feeling is with us. Permit me to ask you to feel and be felt by my friend Mr. So-and-so is still among the more old fashioned of our country gentlemen in districts remote from towns, the customary formula for a flat land introduction. But in the towns and among men of business the words be felt by are omitted, and the sentence is abbreviated to let me ask you to feel Mr. So-and-so, although it is assumed of course that the feeling is to be reciprocal. Among our still more modern and dashing young gentlemen who are extremely averse to superfluous effort and supremely indifferent to the purity of their native language, the formula is still further curtailed by the use of to feel in a technical sense, meaning to recommend for the purposes of feeling and being felt. And at this moment the slang of light or fast society in the upper classes sanctions such a barbarism as Mr. Smith, permit me to feel you Mr. Jones. Let not my reader however suppose that feeling is with us the tedious process that it would be with you, or that we find it necessary to feel right round all the sides of every individual before we determine the class to which he belongs. Long practice training begun in the schools and continued in the experience of daily life enable us to discriminate at once by the sense of touch between the angles of an equal-sided triangle, square and pentagon. And I need not say that the brainless vertex of an acute-angled isosceles is obvious to the dullest touch. It is therefore not necessary as a rule to do more than feel a single angle of any individual and this, once ascertained, tells us the class of the person whom we are addressing. Unless indeed he belongs to the higher sections of the nobility. There the difficulty is much greater. Even a master of arts in our University of Wentbridge has been known to confuse a ten-sided with a twelve-sided polygon. And there is hardly a doctor of science in or out of that famous university who could pretend to promptly and unhesitatingly between a twenty-sided and a twenty-four sided member of the aristocracy. Those of my readers who recall the extracts I gave above from the legislative code concerning women will readily perceive that the process of introduction by contact requires some care and discretion. Otherwise the angles might inflict on the unwary feeler irreparable injury. It is essential for the safety of the feeler that the felt should stand perfectly still. A start, a fidgety shifting of the position, yes even a violent sneeze has been known before now to prove fatal to the unconscious and to nip in the bud many a promising 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 more over 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 as air 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 votes 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 occurred to his great-great-great-grandfather a respectable working man with an angle or brain of fifty-nine degrees thirty minutes. According to his account, my unfortunate 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 all of my ancestors' relations threw back our family a degree and a half in their assent towards better things. The result was that in the next generation the family brain was registered at only fifty-eight degrees, and not till the lapse of five generations was the lost ground recovered, the full sixty degrees attained, and the assent from the isosceles finally achieved. And all this series of calamities from one little accident in the process of feeling. At 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 can 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 one straight line at a time, or at all events only a number of bits of straight lines all in one straight line, how can you ever discern any 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 admit 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 sixty 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 sixty degrees, specimens 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 individuals of the half-degree and single-degree class, and a fair abundance of specimens up to ten degrees. These are absolutely destitute of civic rights, and a great number of them, not having even intelligence enough for the purposes of warfare, are devoted by the state to the service of education. Fettered immovably, so as to remove all possibility of danger, they are placed in the classrooms of our infant schools, and there they are utilized by the Board of Education for the purpose of imparting to the offspring of the middle classes that tact and intelligence of which these wretched creatures themselves are utterly devoid. In some states the specimens are occasionally fed and suffered to exist for several years, but in the more temperate and better regulated regions it is found in the long run more advantageous for the educational interests of the young to dispense with food and to renew the specimens every month, which is about the average duration of the foodless existence of the criminal class. In the cheaper schools, what is gained by the longer existence of the specimens is lost partly in the expenditure for food, and partly in the diminished accuracy of the angles which are impaired after a few weeks of constant feeling. Nor must we forget to add, in enumerating the advantages of the more expensive system, that it tends, though slightly yet perceptibly, to the diminution of the redundant isosceles population, an object which every statesman in flatland constantly keeps in view. On the whole, therefore, although I am not ignorant that in many popularly elected school boards there is a reaction in favour of the cheap system, as it is called, I am myself disposed to think that this is one of the many cases in which expense is the truest economy. But I must not allow questions of school board politics to divert me from my subject. Enough has been said, I trust, to show that recognition by feeling is not so tedious or indecisive a process as might have been supposed, and it is obviously more trustworthy than recognition by hearing. Still there remain, as has been pointed out above, the objection that this method is not without danger. For this reason many in the middle and lower classes, and all without exception in the polygonal and circular orders, prefer a third method, the description of which shall be reserved for the next section. End of Part 1, Section 5 Recording by Ruth Golding Part 1, Sections 6 and 7 of Flatland This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Ruth Golding Flatland, a romance of many dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott. Part 1, Section 6 of recognition by sight I am about to appear very inconsistent. In previous sections I have said that all figures in Flatland present the appearance of a straight line, and it was added or implied that it is consequently impossible to distinguish by the visual organ between individuals of different classes. Yet now I am about to explain to my Spaceland critics how we are able to recognize one another by the sense of sight. If, however, the reader will take the trouble to refer to the passage in which recognition by feeling is stated to be universal, he will find this qualification among the lower classes. It is only among the higher classes and in our more temperate climates that sight recognition is practiced. That this power exists in any regions and for any classes is the result of fog, which prevails during the greater part of the year in all parts, save the torrid zones. That which is with you in Spaceland an unmixed evil blotting out the landscape and depressing the spirits and enfeebling the health is by us recognized as a blessing scarcely inferior to air itself and as the nurse of arts and parent of sciences. But let me explain my meaning without further eulogies on this beneficent element. If fog were non-existent all lines would appear equally and indistinguishably clear and this is actually the case in those unhappy countries in which the atmosphere is perfectly dry and transparent. But wherever there is a rich supply of fog objects that are at a distance say of three feet are appreciably dimmer than those at a distance of two feet eleven inches. And the result is that by careful and constant experimental observation of comparative dimness and fairness we are enabled to infer with great exactness the configuration of the object observed. An instance will do more than a volume of generalities to make my meaning clear. Suppose I see two individuals approaching whose rank I wish to ascertain they are we will suppose a merchant and a physician or in other words an equilateral triangle and a pentagon how am I to distinguish them? Readers note the following paragraph makes reference to an accompanying diagram. Diagram one is a rightward pointing equilateral triangle the vertical left hand side of which is marked BC the other two sides being marked BA and CA dotted lines are drawn from B and C to a point further to the right to form an isosceles triangle. The far right hand point of this triangle represents the eye of the observer and a horizontal dotted arrow pointing left from it indicates his eye glance. A broad vertical line DAE is drawn to indicate what the observer sees. DAE is bright at the centre and darkens sharply towards its ends. End of readers note. It will be obvious to every child in space land who has touched the threshold of geometrical studies that if I can bring my eye so that its glance may bisect an angle A of the approaching stranger my view will lie as it were evenly between his two sides that are next to me vis CA and AB so that I shall contemplate the two partially and both will appear of the same size. Now in the case of one the merchant what shall I see? I shall see a straight line DAE in which the middle point A will be very bright because it is nearest to me but on either side the line will shade away rapidly into dimness because the sides AC and AB recede rapidly into the fog and what appear to me as the merchant's extremities vis D and E will be very dim indeed. Readers note. The following paragraph makes reference to an accompanying diagram. Diagram 2 is a regular pentagon sitting on a horizontal base with C1 at the apex, A1 at middle right and B1 at lower right. Longer dotted lines are drawn out towards the right, upwards from B1 and downwards from C1 to form an irregular pentagon. The far right hand point of the extended pentagon represents the eye of the observer and a dotted arrow pointing from it towards the centre of the lower left edge of the pentagon indicates his eye glance. Again a broad line D1, A1, E1 parallel to the lower left edge of the pentagon is drawn to indicate what the observer sees. D1, A1, E1 is bright at the centre and darkens very gradually towards its ends. End of Readers note. On the other hand in the case of 2 the physician though I shall here also see a line D1, A1, E1 with a bright centre D1 yet it will shade away less rapidly into dimness because the sides A1, C1, A1, B1 recede less rapidly into the fog and what appear to me the physician's extremities, there's D1 and E1 will be not so dim as the extremities of the merchant. The Reader will probably understand from these two instances how after a very long training supplemented by constant experience it is possible for the well educated classes among us to discriminate with fair accuracy between the middle and lowest orders by the sense of sight. If my spaceland patrons have grasped this general conception so far as to conceive the possibility of it and not to reject my account as altogether incredible I shall have attained all I can reasonably expect. Where I to attempt further details I should only perplex. Yet for the sake of the young inexperienced who may perchance in fur from the two simple instances I have given above of the manner in which I should recognise my father and my sons, that recognition by sight is an easy affair, it may be needful to point out that in actual life most of the problems of sight recognition are far more subtle and complex. If for example when my father the triangle approaches me he happens to present his side to me instead of his angle, then until I have asked him to rotate or until I have edged my eye round him I am for the moment doubtful whether he may not be a straight line or in other words a woman. Readers note the following paragraph makes reference to an accompanying diagram. The diagram shows a hexagon with points at top and bottom. The vertical right hand side is marked A B. Dotted lines are drawn downward from the top most and upward from the bottom most points of the hexagon and extended to the right until they meet forming an irregular pentagon. The far right hand point of the pentagon represents the eye of the observer. The line A B is extended to where it meets the dotted lines to form a broad vertical line C A B D. The middle portion of this line A B is bright and the outer portions darken towards C and D. End of Readers note. Again when I am in the company of one of my two hexagonal grandsons contemplating one of his sides A B full front it will be evident from the accompanying diagram that I shall see one whole line A B in comparative brightness shading off hardly at all at the ends and two smaller lines C A and B D dim throughout and shading away into greater dimness toward the extremities C and D. But I must not give way to the temptation of enlarging on these topics. The meanest mathematician in Space Land will readily believe me when I assert that the problems of life which present themselves to the well educated when they are themselves in motion rotating advancing or retreating and at the same time attempting to discriminate by the sense of sight between a number of polygons of high rank moving in different directions as for example in a ballroom or conversazione must be of a nature to task the angularity of the most intellectual and amply justify the rich endowments of the learned professors of geometry both static and kinetic in the illustrious University of Wentbridge where the science and art of sight recognition are regularly taught to large classes of the elite of the states. It is only a few of the science of our noblest and wealthiest houses who are able to give the time and money necessary for the thorough prosecution of this noble and valuable art. Even to me a mathematician of no means standing and the grandfather of two most hopeful and perfectly regular hexagons defined myself in the midst of a crowd of rotating polygons of the higher classes is occasionally very perplexing. And of course to a common tradesman or surf such a sight is almost as unintelligible as it would be to my reader were you suddenly transported into our country in such a crowd you could see on all sides of you nothing but a line apparently straight but of which the parts would vary irregularly and perpetually in brightness or dimness even if you had completed your third year in the pentagonal and hexagonal classes in the University and were perfect in the theory of the subject you would still find that there was need of many years of experience before you could move in a fashionable crowd without jostling against your betters whom it is against etiquette to ask to feel and who by their superior culture and breeding know all about your movements while you know very little or nothing about theirs in a word to comport oneself with perfect propriety in polygonal society one ought to be a polygon oneself such at least is the painful teaching of my experience it is astonishing how much the art or I may almost call it instinct of sight recognition is developed by the habitual practice of it and by the avoidance of the custom of feeling just as with you the deaf and dumb if once allowed to gesticulate and to use the hand alphabet will never acquire the more difficult but far more valuable art of lip speech and lip reading so it is with us as regards seeing and feeling none who in early life resort to feeling will ever learn seeing in perfection for this reason among our higher classes feeling is discouraged or absolutely forbidden from the cradle their children instead of going to the public elementary schools where the art of feeling is taught are sent to higher seminaries of an exclusive character and at our illustrious university to feel is regarded as a most serious fault involving rustication for the first offense and expulsion for the second but among the lower classes the art of sight recognition is regarded as an unattainable luxury a common tradesman cannot afford to let his son spend a third of his life in abstract studies the children of the poor are therefore allowed to feel from their earliest years and they gain thereby a precocity and an early vivacity which contrast at first most favorably with the inert undeveloped and listless behavior of the half-instructed youths of the polygonal class but when the latter have at last completed their university course and are prepared to put their theory into practice the change that comes over them may almost be described as a new birth and in every art science and social pursuit they rapidly overtake and distance their triangular competitors only a few of the polygonal class fail to pass the final test or leaving examination at the university the condition of the unsuccessful minority is truly pitiable rejected from the higher class they are also despised by the lower they have neither the matured and systematically trained powers of the polygonal bachelors and masters of arts nor yet the native precocity and mercurial versatility of them the professions the public services are closed against them and though in most states they are not actually debarred from marriage yet they have the greatest difficulty in forming suitable alliances as experience shows that the offspring of such unfortunate and ill-endowed parents is generally itself unfortunate if not positively irregular it is from these specimens of the refuse of our nobility that the great tumults and seditions of past ages have generally derived their leaders and so great is the mischief that an increasing minority of our more progressive statesmen are of opinion that true mercy would dictate their entire suppression by enacting that all who fail to pass the final examination of the university should be either imprisoned for life or extinguished by a painless death but I find myself digressing into the subject of irregularities a matter of such vital interest that it demands a separate section section seven of irregular figures throughout the previous pages I have been assuming what perhaps should have been laid down at the beginning as a distinct and fundamental proposition that every human being in flatland is a regular figure that is to say of regular construction by this I mean that a woman must not only be a line but a straight line that an artisan or soldier must have two of his sides equal that tradesmen must have three sides equal lawyers of which class I am a humble member that in every polygon all the sides must be equal the size of the sides would of course depend upon the age of the individual a female at birth would be about an inch long while a tall adult woman might extend to a foot as to the males of every class it may be roughly said that the lengths of an adult's sides when added together is three feet or a little more but the size of our sides is not under consideration I am speaking of the equality of sides and it does not need much reflection to see that the whole of the social life in flatland rests upon the fundamental fact that nature wills all figures to have their sides equal if our sides were unequal our angles would be unequal instead of being sufficient to feel or estimate by sight a single angle in order to determine the form of an individual it would be necessary to ascertain each angle by the experiment of feeling but life would be too short for such a tedious groping the whole science and art of sight recognition would at once perish feeling so far as it is an art would not long survive into course would become perilous or impossible there would be an end to all confidence all forethought no one would be safe in making the most simple social arrangements in a word civilization would relax into barbarism am I going too fast to carry my readers with me to these obvious conclusions surely a moment's reflection and a single instance from common life can convince everyone that our whole social system is based upon regularity or equality of angles you meet for example two or three tradesmen in the street whom you recognize at once to be tradesmen by a glance at their angles and rapidly bedimmed sides and you ask them to step into your house to lunch this you do at present with perfect confidence because everyone knows to an inch or two the area occupied by an adult triangle but imagine that your tradesman drags behind his regular and respectable vertex a parallelogram of 12 or 13 inches in diagonal what are you to do with such a monster sticking fast in your house door but I am insulting the intelligence of my readers by accumulating details which must be patent to everyone who enjoys the advantages of a residence in space land obviously the measurements of a single angle would no longer be sufficient under such poor tenter circumstances one's whole life would be taken up in feeling or surveying the perimeter of one's acquaintances already the difficulties of avoiding a collision in a crowd are enough to tax the sagacity of even a well educated square but if no one could calculate the regularity of a single figure in the company all would be chaos and confusion and the slightest panic would cause serious injuries or if there happened to be any women or soldiers present perhaps considerable loss of life expediency therefore concurs with nature in stamping the seal of its approval upon regularity of conformation nor has the law been backward in seconding their efforts irregularity of figure means with us the same as or more than a combination of moral obliquity and criminality with you and is treated accordingly there are not wanting it is true some promulgators of paradoxes who maintain that there is no necessary connection between geometrical and moral irregularity the irregular they say is from his birth scouted by his own parents derided by his brothers and sisters neglected by the domestics scorned and suspected by society and excluded from all posts of responsibility trust and useful activity his every movement is jealously watched by the police till he comes of age and presents himself for inspection then he is either destroyed if he is found to exceed the fixed margin of deviation or else immured in a government office as a clerk of the seventh class prevented from marriage forced to drudge at an uninteresting occupation for a miserable stipend obliged to live and board at the office and to take even his vacation under close supervision what wonder that human nature even in the best and purest is embittered and perverted by such surroundings all this very plausible reasoning does not convince me as it has not convinced the wisest of our statesmen that our ancestors erred in laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the state doubtless the life of an irregular is hard but the interests of the greater number require that it shall be hard if a man with a triangular front and a polygonal back were allowed to exist and to propagate a still more irregular posterity what would become of the arts of life are the houses and doors and churches in flatland to be altered in order to accommodate such monsters are our ticket collectors to be required to measure every man's perimeter before they allow him to enter a theatre or to take his place in a lecture room is an irregular to be exempted from the militia and if not how is he to be prevented from carrying desolation into the ranks of his comrades again what irresistible temptations to fraudulent in postures needs beset such a creature how easy for him to enter a shop with his polygonal front foremost and to order goods to any extent from a confiding tradesman let the advocates of a falsely called philanthropy plead as they may for the abrogation of the irregular penal laws I for my part have never known an irregular who was not also what nature evidently intended him to be a hypocrite a misanthropist and up to the limits of his power a perpetrator of all manner of mischief not that I should be disposed to recommend at present the extreme measures adopted in some states where an infant whose angle deviates by half a degree from the correct angularity is summarily destroyed at birth some of our highest and ablest men men of real genius have during their earliest days laboured under deviations as great as or even greater than 45 minutes and the loss of their precious lives would have been an irreparable injury to the state the art of healing also has achieved some of its most glorious triumphs in the compressions extensions to pannings colligations and other surgical or synthetic operations by which irregularity has been partly or wholly cured advocating therefore a fear media I would lay down no fixed or absolute line of demarcation but at the period when the frame is just beginning to set and when the medical board has reported that recovery is improbable I would suggest that the irregular offspring be painlessly and mercifully consumed end of section 7 recording by Ruth Golding part 1 sections 8 to 10 of flat land this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Ruth Golding flat land a romance of many dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott part 1 section 8 of the ancient practice of painting if my readers have followed me with any attention up to this point they will not be surprised to hear that life is somewhat dull in flat land I do not of course mean that there are not battles conspiracies tumults factions and all those other phenomena which are supposed to make history interesting nor would I deny that the strange mixture of the problems of life and the problems of mathematics continually inducing conjecture and giving the opportunity of immediate verification imparts to our existence a zest which you in space land can hardly comprehend I speak now from the aesthetic and artistic point of view when I say that life with us is dull aesthetically and artistically very dull indeed how can it be otherwise when all ones prospect all ones landscapes historical pieces portraits flowers still life are nothing but a single line with no varieties except degrees of brightness and obscurity it was not always thus color if tradition speaks the truth once for the space of half a dozen centuries or more through a transient charm upon the lives of our ancestors in the remotest ages some private individual a pentagon whose name is variously reported having casually discovered the constituents of the simpler colors and a rudimentary method of painting is said to have begun by decorating first his house then his slaves then his father his sons and grandsons lastly himself the convenience as well as the beauty of the results commended themselves to all wherever chromaticities for by that name the most trustworthy authorities concur in calling him turned his variegated frame there he at once excited attention and attracted respect no one now needed to feel him no one mistook his front for his back all his movements were readily ascertained by his neighbors without the slightest strain on their powers of calculation no one jostled him or failed to make way for him his voice was saved the labor of that exhausting utterance by which we colorless squares and pentagons are often forced to proclaim our individuality when we move amid a crowd of ignorant isosceles the fashions spread like wildfire before a week was over every square and triangle in the district had copied the example of chromaticities and only a few of the more conservative pentagons still held out found even the dodeca-dons infected with the innovation a year had not elapsed before the habit had spread to all but the very highest of the nobility needless to say the customs soon made its way from the district of chromaticities to surrounding regions and within two generations no one in all flatland was colorless except the women and the priests here nature herself appeared to erect a barrier and to plead against extending the innovation to these two classes many sidedness was almost essential as a pretext for the innovators distinction of sides is intended by nature to imply distinction of colors such was asophism which in those days flew from mouth to mouth converting whole towns at a time to the new culture but manifestly to our priests and women this adage did not apply the latter had only one side and therefore plurally and pedantically speaking no sides the former if at least they would assert their claim to be really and truly circles and not mere high class polygons with an infinitely large number of infinitesimally small sides were in the habit of boasting what women confessed and deplored that they also had no sides being blessed with a perimeter of one line or in other words a circumference hence it came to pass that these two classes could see no force in the so-called axiom about distinction of sides applying distinction of color and when all others had succumbed to the fascinations of corporal decoration the priests and the women alone still remained pure from the pollution of paint immoral licentious anarchical unscientific call them by what names you will yet from an aesthetic point of view those ancient days of the color evoked with a glorious childhood art in flatland a childhood alas that never ripened into manhood nor even reached the blossom of youth to live was then in itself a delight because living implied seeing even at a small party the company was a pleasure to behold the richly varied hues of the assembly in a church or theater are said to have more than once proved too distracting for our greatest teachers and actors but most ravishing of all is said to have been the unspeakable magnificence of a military review the site of a line of battle of twenty thousand isosceles suddenly facing about and exchanging the somber black of their bases for the orange and purple of the two sides including their acute angle the militia of the equilateral triangles try colored in red, white and blue the mauve ultramarine gamboge and burnt umber of the square artillerymen rapidly rotating near their vermilion guns the dashing and flashing of the five colored and six colored pentagons and hexagons careering across the field in their offices of surgeons geometricians and aid de camp all these may well have been sufficient to render credible the famous story how an industrious circle overcome by the artistic beauty of the forces under his command through aside his marshals baton and his royal crown exclaiming that he henceforth exchanged them for the artist's pencil how great and glorious the sensuous development of these days must have been is in part indicated by the very language and vocabulary of the period the communist utterances of the communist citizens in the time of the color revolt seem to have been suffused with a richer tinge of word or thought and to that era we are even now indebted for our finest poetry and for whatever rhythm still remains in the more scientific utterance of these modern days section nine of the universal color bill but meanwhile the intellectual arts were fast decaying the art of sight recognition being no longer needed was no longer practiced and the studies of geometry statics kinetics and other kindred subjects came soon to be considered superfluous and fell into dispute and neglect even at our university the inferior art of feeling speedily experienced the same fate at our elementary schools then the isosceles classes asserting that the specimens were no longer used nor needed and refusing to pay the customary tribute from the criminal classes to the service of education waxed daily more numerous and more insolent on the strength of their immunity from the old burden which had formally exercised the twofold wholesome effect of at once taming their brutal nature and thinning their excessive numbers year by year the soldiers and artisans began more vehemently to assert and with increasing truth that there was no great difference between them and the very highest class of polygons now that they were raised to inequality with the latter and enabled to grapple with all the difficulties and solve all the problems of life whether statical and kinetical by the simple process of colour recognition not content with the natural neglect into which site recognition was falling they began boldly to demand the legal prohibition of all monopolizing and aristocratic arts and the consequent abolition of all endowments for the studies of site recognition and feeling soon they began to insist that in as much as colour which was a second nature had destroyed the need of aristocratic distinctions the law should follow in the same path and that hence forth all individuals and all classes should be recognized as absolutely equal and entitled to equal rights finding the higher orders wavering and undecided the leaders of the revolution advanced still further in their requirements and at last demanded that all classes alike the priests and the women not accepted should do homage to colour by submitting to be painted when it was objected that priests and women had no sides they retorted that nature and expediency concurred in dictating that the front half of every human being that is to say the half containing his eye and mouth should be distinguishable from his hindre half they therefore brought before a general and extraordinary assembly of all the states of flatland a bill proposing that in every woman the half containing the eye and mouth should be coloured red and the other half green the priests were to be painted in the same way red being applied to that semicircle in which the eye and mouth formed the middle point while the other or hindre semicircle was to be coloured green there was no little cunning in this proposal which indeed emanated not from any isosceles for no being so degraded would have had angularity enough to appreciate much less to devise such a model of statecraft but from an irregular circle who instead of being destroyed in his childhood was reserved by a foolish indulgence to bring desolation on his country and destruction on myriads of his followers on the one hand the proposition was calculated to bring the women in all classes over to the side of the chromatic innovation for by assigning to the women the same two colours as were assigned to the priests the revolutionists thereby ensured that in certain positions every woman would appear like a priest and be treated with corresponding respect and deference a prospect that could not fail to attract the female sex in a mass but by some of my readers the possibility of the identical appearance of priests and women under the new legislation may not be recognised if so a word or two will make it obvious imagine a woman duly decorated according to the new code with the front half i.e. the half containing eye and mouth red and with the behinder half green look at her from one side obviously you will see a straight line half red half green readers note the following paragraph makes reference to an accompanying diagram the diagram shows a circle or priestly figure if it is this your lives as a clock face twelve o'clock is marked M for the priest's mouth three o'clock is marked B and nine o'clock is marked A the diameter A B is drawn as a dotted line and is extended outside the circle rightwards to a point which represents the position of the observer dotted lines are drawn downward and rightward from M towards this point and upward and rightward from six o'clock to this point a broad vertical line C B D is drawn between the dotted lines to indicate what the observer sees C B D is bright at the centre and darkens sharply towards its ends now imagine a priest whose mouth is at M and whose front semicircle A M B is consequently coloured red while his behinder semicircle is green so that the diameter A B divides the green from the red if you contemplate the great man so as to have your eye in the same straight line as his dividing diameter A B what you will see will be a straight line C B D of which one half C B will be red and the other B D green the whole line C D will be rather shorter perhaps than that of a full sized woman and will shade off more rapidly towards its extremities but the identity of the colours would give you an immediate impression of identity if not class making you neglectful of other details bear in mind the decay of sight recognition which threatened society at the time of the colour revolt add to the certainty that women would speedily learn to shade off their extremities to imitate the circles it must then be surely obvious to you my dear reader that the colour bill placed us under a great danger of confounding a priest with a young woman how attractive this prospect must have been to the frail sex may readily be imagined they anticipated with delight the confusion that would ensue at home might hear political and ecclesiastical secrets intended not for them but for their husbands and brothers and might even issue command in the name of a priestly circle out of doors the striking combination of red and green without addition of any other colours would be sure to lead the common people into endless mistakes and the women would gain whatever the circles lost in the deference of the passes by as for the scandal that would befall the circular class if the frivolous and unseemly conduct of the women were imputed to them and as to the consequence of version of the constitution the female sex could not be expected to give a thought to these considerations even in the households of the circles the women were all in favour of the universal colour bill the second object aimed at by the bill was the gradual demoralisation of the circles themselves in the general intellectual decay they still preserved their pristine clearness and strength of understanding from their earliest childhood familiarised in their circular households with the total absence of colour the nobles alone preserved the sacred art of sight recognition with all the that result from that admirable training of the intellect hence up to the date of the introduction of the universal colour bill the circles had not only held their own but even increased their lead of other classes by abstinence from the popular fashion now therefore the artful irregular whom I described above as the real author of this diabolical bill determined at one blow to lower the status of the hierarchy by forcing them to submit to the pollution of colour and at the same time to destroy their domestic opportunities of training in the art of sight recognition so as to enfeeble their intellects by depriving them of their pure and colourless homes once subjected to the chromatic taint every parental and every childish circle would demoralise each other only in discerning between the father and the mother would the circular infant find problems for the exercise of its understanding problems too often likely to be corrupted by maternal imposters with the result of shaking the child's faith in all logical conclusions thus by degrees the intellectual lustre of the priestly order would wane and the road would then lie open for a total destruction of all aristocratic legislature and for the subversion of our privileged classes section 10 of the suppression of the chromatic sedition the agitation for the universal colour bill continued for three years and up to the last moment of that period it seemed as though anarchy were destined to triumph a whole army of polygons who turned out to fight as private soldiers was utterly annihilated by a superior force of isosceles triangles the squares and pentagons meanwhile remaining neutral worse than all some of the ablest circles fell a prey to conjugal fury infuriated by political animosity the wives in many a noble household wearied their lords with prayers to give up their opposition to the colour bill and some finding their entreaties fruitless fell on and slaughtered their innocent children and husbands perishing themselves in the act of carnage it is recorded that during that triennial agitation no less than 23 circles perished in domestic discord great indeed was the peril it seemed as though the priests had no choice between submission and extermination when suddenly the course of events was completely changed by one of those picturesque incidents which statesman ought never to neglect often to anticipate and sometimes perhaps to originate because of the absurdly disproportionate power with which they appeal to the sympathies of the populace it happened that an isosceles of a low type with a brain little if at all above four degrees accidentally dabbling in the colours of some tradesman whose shop he had plundered painted himself or caused himself to be painted for the story varies with the twelve colours of a dodecahedron going into the marketplace he accosted in a feigned voice a maiden the orphaned daughter of a noble polygon whose affection in former days he had sought in vain and by a series of perceptions aided on the one side by a string of lucky accidents too long to relate and on the other by an almost inconceivable fatuity and neglect of ordinary precautions on the part of the relations of the bride he succeeded in consummating the marriage the unhappy girl committed suicide on discovering the fraud to which she had been subjected when the news of this catastrophe spread from state to state the minds of the women were violently agitated sympathy with the miserable victim and anticipations of similar deceptions for themselves their sisters and their daughters made them now regard the colour bill in an entirely new aspect not a few openly avowed themselves converted to antagonism the rest needed only a slight stimulus to make a similar avowal seizing this favourable opportunity the circles hastily convened an extraordinary assembly of the states and besides the usual guard of convicts they secured the attendance of a large number of reactionary women amidst an unprecedented concourse the chief circle of those days by name Pantocyclus arose to find himself hissed and hooted by 120,000 isosceles but he secured silence by declaring that henceforth the circles would enter on a policy of concession yielding to the wishes of the majority they would accept the colour bill the uproar being at once converted to applause he invited chromaticities the leader of the sedition into the centre of the hall to receive in the name of his followers the submission of the hierarchy then followed a speech a masterpiece of rhetoric which occupied nearly a day in the delivery and to which no summary can do justice with a grave appearance of impartiality he declared that as they were now finally committing themselves to reform or innovation it was desirable that they should take one last view of the perimeter of the whole subject its defects as well as its advantages gradually introducing the mention of the dangers to the tradesmen the professional classes and the gentlemen he silenced the rising murmurs of the isosceles by reminding them that in spite of all these defects he was willing to accept the bill if it was approved by the majority but it was manifest that all except the isosceles were his words and were either neutral or averse to the bill turning now to the workmen he asserted that their interests must not be neglected and that if they intended to accept the colour bill they ought at least to do so with a full view of the consequences many of them he said were on the point of being admitted to the class of the regular triangles for their children a distinction they could not hope for themselves that honourable ambition would now have to be sacrificed with the universal adoption of colour all distinctions would cease regularity would be confused with irregularity development would give place to retrogression the workmen would in a few generations be degraded to the level of military or even the convict class political power would be in the hands of the greatest number that is to say the criminal classes who were already more numerous than the workmen and would soon outnumber all the other classes put together when the usual compensative laws of nature were violated a subdued murmur of assent ran through the ranks of the artisans and chromatisties in alarm attempted to step forward and address them but he found himself encompassed with guards and forced to remain silent while the chief circle in a few impassioned words made a final appeal to the women exclaiming that if the colour bill passed no marriage would henceforth be safe no woman's honour secure fraud, deception, hypocrisy would lead every household domestic bliss would share the fate of the constitution and pass to speedy perdition sooner than this he cried come death at these words which were the preconcerted signal for action the isosceles convicts fell on and chance fixed the wretched chromatisties the regular classes opening their ranks made way for a band of women under direction of the circles moved back invisibly and unerringly upon the unconscious soldiers the artisans imitating the example of their betters also opened their ranks meantime bands of convicts occupied every entrance with an impenetrable phalanx the battle or rather carnage was of short duration under the skillful generalship of the circles almost every woman's charge was fatal and very many extracted their sting uninjured ready for a second slaughter but no second blow was needed the rabble of the isosceles did the rest of the business for themselves surprised, leaderless, attacked in front by invisible foes and finding egrets cut off by the convicts behind them they at once after their manner lost all presence of mind and raised the cry of treachery this sealed their fate every isosceles now saw and felt a foe in every other in half an hour not one of that vast multitude was living and the fragments of seven score thousand of the criminal class slain by one another's angles attested the triumph of order the circles delayed not to push their victory to the uttermost the working men they spared but decimated the militia of the equilaterals was at once called out and every triangle suspected of irregularity on reasonable grounds was destroyed by court-martial without the formality of exact measurement by the social board and the criminal classes were inspected in a course of visitations extending through upwards of a year and during that period every town, village and hamlet was systematically purged of that excess of the lower orders which had been brought about by the neglect to pay the tribute of criminals to the schools and university and by the violation of other natural laws of the constitution of flatland was then restored needless to say that henceforth the use of color was abolished and its possession prohibited even the utterance of any word denoting color except by the circles or by qualified scientific teachers was punished by a severe penalty only at our university in some of the very highest village to attend it is understood that the sparing use of color is still sanctioned for the purpose of illustrating some of the deeper problems of mathematics but of this I can only speak from hearsay elsewhere in flatland color is now nonexistent the art of making it is known to only one living person the chief circle for the time being and by him it is handed down from his bed to none but his successor one manufactory alone produces it and lest the secret should be betrayed the workmen are annually consumed and fresh ones introduced so great is the terror with which even now our aristocracy looks back to the far distant days of the agitation for the universal color bill 10 recording by Ruth Golding