One of the joys of reading children's books is discovering inconsistencies and paradoxes that you never noticed as a child. For example, I realized some years ago that if Horton the Elephant was an amazing spectacle because he sat in a tree, his hatching out an Elephant-Bird was an even greater attraction, so the likelihood that he would be sent "home happy one-hundred percent" was extremely small. If the circus made money exhibiting an Elephant in a tree, they could make much more exhibiting a unique Elephant-Bird. The book concludes with "It should be, it should be, it should be like that," but the repetition smacks of desperation. We all know it isn't like that at all. Horton's faithfulness would not earn him any favors from the circus.
With my interest in mathematics, it was only a matter of time before I sat down to calculate Horton's clover-picking rate in Horton Hears A Who. For those who don't remember, Horton discovered an entire city of tiny persons on a speck of dust. He caught the speck on a soft, pink clover, but other animals, believing him to be delusional, stole the clover and deposited it into a field of clovers one hundred miles wide. So Horton begins the arduous task of looking for the clover with the dust speck. He begins in the morning, and the text says:
And by noon poor old Horton, more dead than alive
Had picked, searched, and piled up nine thousand and five.
Then, on through the afternoon, hour after hour,
Till he found them at last! On the three millionth flower!
Let's suppose generously, that Horton finally finds his friends by 9:00 PM. He would have to search \(3,000,000 - 9005 = 2,990,995\) clovers in nine hours, giving an effective clover search rate of \(2,990,995 \div (9 \times 60) = 5,538.8796 \) clovers per minute. Of course, at that rate, Horton could have started searching at less than 98 seconds before noon to search \(9005\) clovers by noon. The text says that the black-bottomed bird dropped the clover at 6:56 in the morning. Horton, losing no time, began his search right away. Suppose he started at 7:00 AM as soon as he could clamber down into the field. Then Horton woould search at a rate of \(9005 \div (5 \times 60 = 30.0167\) clovers per minute. At a rate of \(30\) clovers per minute, Horton's afternoon search would take \(99,699.8333\) minutes, which is roughly equivalent to \(69\) days, before finding the dust speck on the three millionth flower. So either Horton, despite already being "more dead than alive" by noon, somehow managed to accelerate his search rate by a truly prodigious factor in excess of \(184\), or his morning search lasted from a couple of minutes before noon until after dark the same day at an inconceivably fast rate of more than \(92\) clovers per second. The latter scenario seems especially unlikely because Horton called out to each clover, "Are you there?" before tossing it onto a pile of clovers. That would be hard to do even at a rate of \(30\) clovers per minute.
I can only conclude that Dr. Seuss took liberties with the narrative, trusting that few people would notice how improbable the rates of clover searching he suggests actually are. Although clearly Horton was a persistent and faithful friend even to the smallest persons, we may never know the truth about how quickly he could actually examine clovers in his search for his friends.