HARDY PERENNIALS

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 36, 12 February 1938, Page 8

HARDY PERENNIALS

SOME CLASSIC PUZZLES

(By Simson Agonistes.) If curiosity killed the cat—as the proverb declares it did —it has been one of thethings that have lifted man above' the beasts. The setting of puzzles and the puzzling out of their answers is a pastime that everyone I has enjoyed; its indulgence begins almost in babyhood, and aged men still keep at it. By asking questions and searching for answers men become wise. But many a question demands an answer that is beyond wisdom.

"What's that, daddy?"—"A cow." "Why?" Well, where's daddy's omniscience now?

A little research would discover a multitude of classic puzzles which in their time have upset homes and broken friendships, if they have not wrecked dynasties. How many angels can dance upon the point of a needle is a question which is said to have created a great religious controversy. A king is said to have turned his court into a bear-garden of argument by asking why a bucket of water containing a fish weighed no more than if the fish was taken put—a question which was furiously disputed until someone who had a dangerous lack of respect for royal opinion did the obvious thing, weighed the bucket, and abolished the question.

Some ancient puzzles have a plausible air but are unanswerable. For instance, there is the famous question, "What would happen if an irresistible force met an immovable object?" One knows the thing cannot happen, because such a force and such an object do not exist; but it is possible to imagine them, and one would suppose, therefore. • that there should be an answer; but it is no easier to find than the place where flies go in the winter. The biologists have never been able to say which came first—the hen or the egg. They take refuge in a long, rambling tale about evolution, and finally escape by saying that it all happened so long ago that nobody remembers. But they have not that excuse for not answering a puzzle that arises here and now, in your house and mine and on every hedge: What do young spiders live on till they are big enough to catch flies?

There are a great many ancient mathematical puzzles, some of which contributed to the advance of the mathematical art because they required, for their solution, the invention of new mathematical methods. In this sphere also there are questions which cannot be answered exactly. For instance, the distance round a circle whose diameter is known can only be figured out "approximately." But the error is very minute —a matter of a very fine hairs-breadth in a circle a thousand million miles in diameter. So here is another puzzle for the simple mmd —they know there is that small error; and how do they know it? ■

Away from the difficult problems that philosophers wrangle over are the simple riddles and catch-questions that have been current for centuries, but seem never to lose their freshness; and this little essay has been inspired by one which is surely in a class by itself. Probably every newspaper editor is sick of the sight of it, for it is sent in, with astonishing frequency, with a request to settle an argument which threatens to cause anything from a lover's tiff to civil war. Its air of innocent simplicity is false; it is full of guile, and has more lives than seventy cats. Here it is: A man, looking at a portrait, says: "Sisters and brothers I have none, yet that man's father is my father's son." Whose portrait .is he looking at? Well, of course, it's easy. His own. No? Well then, his son's. Or is. it his father's? There you are. We think we know the answer—but we may be wrong.