In the year of our Lord 1432, there arose a griveous quarrel among the brethren over the number of teeth in the mouth of a horse. For 13 days the disputation raged without ceasing. All the ancient books and chronicles were fetched out, and wonderful and ponderous erudition, such as was never before heard in this region, was made manifest. At the beginning of the 14th day, a youthful friar of goodly bearing asked his learned superiors for permission to add a word, and straithway, to wonderment of the disputants, whose deep wisdom he sore vexed, he beseeched them to unbend in a manner coarse and unheard-of, and to look in the open mouth of a horse and find an answer to their questionings. At this, their dignity being greveously hurt, they waxed exceedingly wroth; and, joining in a mighty uproar, they flew upon him and smote him hip and thigh, and cast him out forthwith. For, said they, surely Satan hath tempted this bold neophyte to declare unholy and unheard-of ways of finding truth contrary to all the teachings of the fathers.
After many days more of griveous strife the dove of peace sat on the assembly, and they as one man, declaring the problem to be of everlasting mystery because of a griveous strife of historical and theological evidence thereof, so ordered the same writ down. [Probably apocryphal, attributed to Bacon.]
Horse’s teeth: an apocryphal story
18 Saturday Sep 2010
Posted Uncategorized
inQuoted from Introduction to Research in Education by Donald Ary, Lucy Cheser Jacobs, Asghar Razavieh, Chris Sorensen. Wadsworth, 2009. ISBN-10: 0495832529. ISBN-13: 978-0495832522; in their turn, they refer to p. 115. of C. E. K. Mees, Scientific thought and social reconstruction, General Electric Review 37 (1934), 113–119.