In 1861 a quiet, unassuming young Englishman was ordained a deacon in the Mother Church, a position which it was confidently expected by his quiet unassuming friends would lead to greater prominence in Her service. But the young man never advanced in rank handicapped as he was by a stammer which prevented him from reading sermon. Disappointed he turned again to his first work, and in the same year printed an ambitious little volume called "A Syllabus of Plane Allgebraical Geometry." This created but little stir in the pleasant, close cropped countrysides of England, so a year later the literary world was the richer by a book on the "Formulae of Plane Trigonometry" which reached a public scarcely larger. At last in disgust this author changed his name and in 1865 there appeared the biography of a little girl who was not interested in books unless they were well interlarded with illustrations. So strong was this prejudice in the little girl that once when her sister was reading a volume devoid of such attractions she crawled off down a hole in search of a white rabbit she had seen. Thus was Alice sent into wonderland, and thus did Lewis Carrol scale the heights upon which Charles Dodgson has faltered.

Today Lewis Carrol would be 100 years old if he were now living. When he was a much younger man he took a little girl out in a row boat and told her all manner of absurd things which pleased the little girl tremendously, for no one had ever done such a thing before. She became so interested that her older friend wrote out all these stories for her, stories about white queens, and mad hatters and two odd little chumps called Tweedledee and Tweedledum who were in continual fisticuffs over a rattle. People grew suddenly incredibly tall or shrunk away until they prit near weren't there at all. It was all most confusing and bewildering, but such great fun. There is something, quite delightful about the fearful rage of a white knight and the incomprehensible conversation of a sleepy doormouse.

The world has much for which to thank the mathematician at Oxford. He has given a world to children not unlike the one they live in, and to older people he has given nonsense verses not unlike the kind of nonsense verse they would write, if they wrote nonsense verse. He has written also many other things both scientific and whimsical among them being "The New Belfry" in ridicule of some bells put up at Christ Church. It may seem incomprehensible to some that a mathematician could evolve such a wonderland out of his precise, factual mind. But reflect, has not a mathematician much nearer home erected for himself a wonderland of equal whimsy; and has he not also his new belfry?