Miscellaneous Puzzles 55"That's just where you are all wrong," said Jeffries. "The terms of the will
can be exactly carried out, without any mutilation of a horse."
To their astonishment, he showed how it was possible. How should the
horses be divided in strict accordance with the directions?- EQUAL P~RIMETERS
Rational right-angled triangles have been a fascinating subject for study
since the time of Pythagoras, before the Christian era. Every schoolboy
knows that the sides of these, generally expressed in whole numbers, are such
that the square of the hypotenuse is exactly equal to the sum of the squares
of the other two sides. Thus, in the case of Diagram A, the square of 30 (900),
added to the square of 40 (1600), is the square of 50 (2500), and similarly
with Band C. It will be found that the three triangles shown have each the
same perimeter. That is the three sides in every case add up to 120.
Can you find six rational right-angled triangles each with a common perim-
eter, and the smallest possible? It is not a difficult puzzle like my "Four
Princes" (in The Canterbury Puzzles), in which you had to find four such tri-
angles of equal area.174. COUNTING THE WOUNDED
When visiting with a friend one of our hospitals for wounded soldiers,
I was informed that exactly two-thirds of the men had lost an eye, three-
fourths had lost an arm, and four-fifths had lost a leg.
"Then," I remarked to my friend, "it follows that at least twenty-six of the
men must have lost all three-an eye, an arm, and a leg."