Fleas Ad Infinitum

By JonathanSwift?, from "On Poetry, A Rhapsody".

  So, naturalists observe, a flea
  Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
  And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
  And so proceed ad infinitum.
  Thus every poet, in his kind,
  Is bit by him that comes behind.

-- MatthewWilbert

---

The more familiar form comes from AugustusDeMorgan?, in "A Budget of Paradoxes":

  Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
  And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
  And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
  While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

It comes with this nice rejoinder, from around 1922, by LewisFryRichardson?:

  Big whorls have little whorls,
  Which feed on their velocity;
  And little whorls have lesser whorls,
  And so on to viscosity
  (in the molecular sense).

---

http://math.ucdavis.edu/~robinson/funstuff/geekpoetry.html has some neat poems by scientists. I like the StanislawLem one at the top, which starts...

  Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
  Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
  Their indices bedecked from one to n,
  Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

  Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
  And every vector dreams of matrices.
  Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
  It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

  ... 

---

Rabby Burns did write about "Seeing a louse on a Ladies Head" or something like that:

... What a gift t'a gi' us,
to see our'sel, as others see us.

Kind of...

-- DickBotting

---

CategoryWhimsy