ABSTRACT
It is a commonplace that the young are influenced by imagination and reasoning while the old are guided by experience. When I myself was young I had once a remarkable illustration of this fact. I had walked from the old-world village of Clovelly, in Devonshire, to a cape called Hartland Point, from which I could see Lundy Island at the mouth of the Bristol Channel. I got into conversation with a coast guard, who told me that the distance to Clovelly was eight miles, and to Lundy Island ten miles. 'And how far is it from Clovelly to Lundy Island?' I asked. The answer was twenty-two miles. At this I burst out into argument to the effect that two sides of a triangle are always greater than the third side, and that if one went by way of Hartland Point the distance would only be eighteen miles. The coast guard, however, was quite unmoved. 'All I can say, sir,5 he replied, 'is that I was speaking with Captain Jones the other day, and he said: "I've known this coast, man and boy, for thirty years, and I make it twenty-two miles." ' Before the man-and-boy argument, geometry had to retire abashed.
