brothers Schlagintweit, and bringing back some curious
ethnographic observations from that expedition.

During these different journeys, Ferguson had been
the most active and interesting correspondent of the
Daily Telegraph, the penny newspaper whose circulation
amounts to 140,000 copies, and yet scarcely suffices for its
many legions of readers. Thus, the doctor had become
well known to the public, although he could not claim
membership in either of the Royal Geographical Societies
of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, or St. Petersburg, or
yet with the Travellers' Club, or even the Royal Polytechnic
Institute, where his friend the statistician Cockburn
ruled in state.

The latter savant had, one day, gone so far as to propose
to him the following problem: Given the number of
miles travelled by the doctor in making the circuit of the
Globe, how many more had his head described than his
feet, by reason of the different lengths of the radii?--or,
the number of miles traversed by the doctor's head and
feet respectively being given, required the exact height
of that gentleman?

This was done with the idea of complimenting him,
but the doctor had held himself aloof from all the learned
bodies--belonging, as he did, to the church militant and
not to the church polemical. He found his time better
employed in seeking than in discussing, in discovering
rather than discoursing.