How Many Miles to Babylon? In the 1824 edition of "The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia" there's a description of the rhyme and the game, giving the distance as "six, seven or a lang eight". The rhyme was originally accompanied by a singing game in which two lines face each other, with one player in the middle. At the end of the rhyme the players have to cross the space and any caught help the original player in the middle catch the others. The game seems to have fallen out of use in the twentieth century. In literature In film In music How Many Miles to Babylon?
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? dancing on a needle's point occurs in an expository work by the English divine, William Sclater (1575-1626). In "An exposition with notes vpon the first Epistle to the Thessalonians" (1619), Sclater claimed that scholastic philosophers occupied themselves with such pointless questions as whether angels "did occupie a place; and so, whether many might be in one place at one time; and how many might sit on a Needles point; and six hundred such like needlesse points." Harrison proposes that the reason an English writer first introduced the "needle’s point" into a critique of medieval angelology is that it makes for