``The Speaker's public dinners will
commence next week--admittance, 3/- to
see the animals fed.''

As blunders are a class of mistakes, so
``bulls'' are a sub-class of blunders. No
satisfactory explanation of the word has
been given, although it appears to be
intimately connected with the word
blunder. Equally the thing itself has not
been very accurately defined.

The author of _A New Booke of Mistakes_,
1637, which treats of ``Quips,
Taunts, Retorts, Flowts, Frumps, Mockes,
Gibes, Jestes, etc.,'' says in his address to
the Reader, ``There are moreover other
simple mistakes in speech which pass

under the name of Bulls, but if any man
shall demand of mee why they be so
called, I must put them off with this
woman's reason, they are so because they
bee so.'' All the author can affirm is
that they have no connection with the
inns and playhouses of his time styled
the Black Bulls and the Red Bulls.
Coleridge's definition is the best: ``A
bull consists in a mental juxtaposition of
incongruous ideas with the sensation but