For he by geometric scale,
Could take the size of pots of ale.

These lines come from Samuel Butler’s satirical mock-epic poem *Hudibras* (1663–1678), which lampoons Puritan zealotry and pedantry through the misadventures of its protagonist, Sir Hudibras. Butler repeatedly ridicules the era’s fashionable “learning”—especially the pretensions of pseudo-scientific and scholastic reasoning—by applying it to trivial or bodily matters. The joke here is that Hudibras (or a character described in similar terms) is so absurdly “skilled” in geometry that he can use mathematical measurement to gauge something as mundane as the volume of ale in a pot, a comic deflation of intellectual seriousness into tavern practicality.

Butler’s couplet satirizes the misuse of intellectual tools and the vanity of ostentatious expertise. “Geometric scale” evokes the prestige of mathematical exactness, but the object of measurement—“pots of ale”—is deliberately low and comic. The contrast exposes a kind of pedantry that values method over meaning: precision is deployed not for discovery or public good but for petty, self-serving ends. In *Hudibras*, such inversions are central to Butler’s critique of moral and ideological certainty; the poem suggests that those who claim rigorous rationality can be just as ridiculous, and just as driven by appetite, as anyone else.