Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions

Abstract

WE live in an age of adventure. Men are ready to join in expeditions to the North Pole or to the interior of the African continent, yet we will venture to say that the work before us describes a vast plain as yet untrodden by any Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and teeming with a population of which no example has figured in any of our shows. A few years ago a distinguished mathematician published some speculations on the existence of a book-worm “cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd” within the narrow limits of an ordinary sheet of paper, and another writer bewailed “the dreary infinities of homoloidal space.” A third remarks, “there is no logical impossibility in conceiving the existence of intelligent beings, living on and moving along the surface of any solid body, who are able to perceive nothing but what exists on this surface and insensible to all beyond it.” How delighted Prof. Helmholtz will be to find, if this Flatland writer is worthy of credence, his conjecture thus verified. “Flatland” is not the real name of this unknown land (that secret is not divulged), but it is so called here to make its character clear to us Space-denizens. It is a noteworthy fact that one at least of the Flatlanders expresses himself in remarkably correct English, and singularly after the manner of an ordinary Space-human being; and further, though—we regret to have to record it—as a martyr in the cause of the truth of a third dimension, he has spent seven long years in the State jail, yet these memoirs have in some mysterious manner found their way into our hands. There is hope then that some one of our readers may yet expatiate in the broad plain, though the penalty will be, we fear, that he must first become as flat as a pancake and then see to it that his configuration (as a triangle, square, or other figure) is regular. This latter is a sine quâ non in Flat-land, because, whatever you are, your configuration must be regular, or woe betide you, and you will shuffle off your mortal coil incontinently.

Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions.

With Illustrations by the Author, A Square. (London: Seeley and Co., 1884.)