89. It is well known that the law, regulating the apparent decrease in the size of objects as we leave them in the distance (or as they leave us) is very different with luminous bodies from what it is in the case of those which are non-luminous. Sail past the light of a small lamp in a row-boat on a dark night, and it will seem to be no smaller when a mile off than it was when close to it. Proctor says, in speaking of the Sun: "his apparent size does not change!" - far off or near. And then he forgets the fact! Mr. Proctor tells us, subsequently, that, if the traveler goes so far south that the North Star appears on the horizon, "the Sun should therefore look much larger" - if the Earth were a plane! Therefore, he argues, "the path followed cannot have been the straight course," - but a curved one. Now, since it is nothing but common scientific trickery to bring forward, as an objection to stand in the way of a plane Earth, the non-appearance of a thing which has never been known to appear at all, it follows that, unless that which appears to be trickery were an accident, it was the only course open to the objector - to trick. (Mr. Proctor, in a letter to the "English Mechanic" for Oct. 20,1871, boasts of having turned a recent convert to the Zetetic Philosophy by telling him that his arguments were all very good, but that "it seems as though [Mark the language!] the sun ought to look nine times larger in summer." And Mr. Proctor conclude's thus: "He saw, indeed, that, in his faith in "Parallax," he had "written himself down an ass.") Well, then: trickery or no trickery on the part of the objector, the objection is a counterfeit - a fraud - no valid objection at all; and it follows that the system which does not purge itself of these things is a rotten system, and the system which advocates, with Mr. Proctor at their head, a weapon to use - the Zetetic philosophy of "Parallax" - is destined to live! This is a proof that the Earth is not a globe.
For all this text, we need only examine the premise: "It is well known that the law, regulating the apparent decrease in the size of objects as we leave them in the distance (or as they leave us) is very different with luminous bodies from what it is in the case of those which are non-luminous." Despite the claim, luminous bodies obey the same Laws of Optics as non-luminous. Perhaps, Carpenter was confused by the concepts of polarization (or glare). Regardless without it premise, this proof fails.