Mathematics: rigorous, tedious, fantastic, fairy-like

What strikes me about the following quote from Scientific American in 1908 is the opinionated, chatty, subjective, silly, and nearly-trivial tone which so often is blamed on the recent influence of blogging. There ain’t nothing new under the sun.

Mathematics is the most exact and the most thoroughly grounded of the sciences. And yet, in the very field explored by this rigorous and tedious method, have arisen fantastic and fairy-like structures of the imagination, which transcend all our experience. They have arrived at the conception of the fourth and higher dimensions. It would be impossible to confine a person having the secret of this dimension by the six surfaces of a prison cell. His slightest movement in the direction of a fourth dimension would put him at once out of three-dimensional space. It would be well for him to take care just what he did when in four-dimensional space, as upon coming back into space of three dimensions he might be much changed. (Quoted from SciAm here.)

Hang on: tedious? My Encarta World English Dictionary defines tedious as “boring, because of being long, monotonous, or repetetive”, and tedium as stemming from a Latin root meaning “wearisome”. Well, excuse me. Did the author not read my blog? I mean, I know connections were slower in 1908, but still . . .