It may, however, be put into clothes, amidst fruits, pigeons' feathers, and flax tow.

R.Jehudah declares flax tow unallowable and permits only coarse tow.'"[10] Following his rule out, step by step, with unflinching loyalty, into these ridiculous consequences, the Pharisee had entirely lost the power of seeing that they were ridiculous, and was well content to believe, with Jehudah, that the difference between keeping food warm in coarse tow and in flax tow was the difference between life and death.

This _reductio ad absurdum_ of legalism is exactly paralleled, in many of our elementary schools, in the answers to arithmetical questions given by the children.

The "Fifth Standard" boys who told their inspector, as an answer to an easy problem, that a given room was five shillings and sixpence wide, had followed out their rule--they had unfortunately got hold of a wrong rule--step by step, till it led them to a conclusion, the intrinsic absurdity of which they were one and all unable to see.[11] There are many elementary schools in England in which a majority of the answers given to quite easy problems would certainly be wrong, and a respectable minority of them ludicrously wrong.

Nor is this to be wondered at; for though the types of problems that can be set in elementary schools are not numerous, to provide his pupils with the by-rules which shall enable them in all, or even in most cases, to determine which of the recognised rules are appropriate to the given situation, passes the wit of the teacher.