No big thing
Posted by: Epicurean on: July 8, 2011
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
What's on the menu
The reader may please to observe that, in the last article of the recovery of my liberty, the emperor stipulates to allow me a quantity of meat and drink sufficient for the support of 1,728 Lilliputians. Some time after, asking a friend at court how they came to fix on that determinate number, he told me that his majesty’s mathematicians, having taken the height of my body by the help of quadrant, and finding it to exceed their in the proportion of twelve to one, they concluded, from the similarity of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1,728 of theirs and consequently would require as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians.
