MISCELLANEOUS PUZZLES
assume that the ladies attended regularly, and I am sure that they
all worked equally well. A mutual kiss counts as two osculations.
106.—
The Adventurous Snail
A simple version of the puzzle of the climbing snail is familiar to
everybody. We were all taught it in the nursery, and it was
apparently intended to inculcate the simple moral that we should
never slip if we can
help it. This is the
popular story. A
snail crawls up a
pole 12 feet high,
ascending 3 feet
every day and
slipping back 2 feet
every night. How
long does it take to
get to the top ?
Of course, we are
expected to say the
answer is twelve
days, because the
creature makes an
actual advance of 1
foot in every
twenty-four hours. But the modern infant in arms is not taken in in
this way. He says, correctly enough, that at the end of the ninth
day the snail is 3 feet from the top, and therefore reaches the
summit of its ambition on the tenth day, for it would cease to slip
when it had got to the top.
Let us, however, consider the original story. Once upon a time
two philosophers were walking in their garden when one of them
espied a highly respectable member of the Helix Aspersa family, a
pioneer in mountaineering, in the act of making the perilous ascent of
a wall 20 feet high. Judging by the trail, the gentleman calcu-
121
