Covery

The Art of Covery: This is as important and interesting as Dis-covery. Surely the glory of finally getting rid of and burying a long and troublesome matter should be as great as that of making an important discovery. The trouble is that the coverer is like Samson who perished in the wreck of what he had destroyed; if he gets rid of a thing effectually he gets rid of himself too.

This book is indispensable not only because of the discoveries it describes, but almost equally on account of the coveries, to borrow a word from Samuel Butler. A fundamental covery is that the expressions “reductional division” and “equational division,” those bogies of our schooldays, are meaningless.