acknowledge his inability to understand anything and everything in
the universe that had ever been written about the duello.

Littleton Barry.

~~~ End of Text ~~~

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DIDDLING

CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE EXACT SCIENCES.

Hey, diddle diddle
The cat and the fiddle

SINCE the world began there have been two Jeremys. The one wrote a
Jeremiad about usury, and was called Jeremy Bentham. He has been much
admired by Mr. John Neal, and was a great man in a small way. The
other gave name to the most important of the Exact Sciences, and was
a great man in a great way -- I may say, indeed, in the very greatest
of ways.

Diddling -- or the abstract idea conveyed by the verb to diddle -- is
sufficiently well understood. Yet the fact, the deed, the thing
diddling, is somewhat difficult to define. We may get, however, at a
tolerably distinct conception of the matter in hand, by defining- not
the thing, diddling, in itself -- but man, as an animal that diddles.
Had Plato but hit upon this, he would have been spared the affront of
the picked chicken.