On Growth and Form | Style
Allusion
Thompson draws on any number of familiar events, characters, or concepts to illustrate his ideas to make them clearer for the reader. In one particular instance, for example, the author makes reference to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in his discussion of similitude. The principle of similitude, based on the idea that ‘‘in similar figures the surface increases as the square, and the volume as the cube, of the linear dimensions’’ is compared to an instance in Swift’s Lilliput:
His Majesty’s Ministers, finding that...
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