Here it is: the end of the line. You've all made it this far and you're HEROES, I tell you HEROES of trivia. You're like the Iron Chefs of... knowing a bunch of stuff.

In just a few days, it'll all be over, and you can rest on your laurel-stuffed mattresses. But there's one more river to cross. One last round of searingly pointless distraction from everything that is meaningful in the world.

On Scoring: per my senseless dicta back at the start, each of the four questions in Round 3 is worth 101 points, for a possible total of 404 points. This was a pretty lame attempt to have the total possible equal 2004 points. Considering it means that each of the round 3 questions is worth less than the round 2 questions, it strikes me as a typically boneheaded Wombat File move.

But what's done is done: 101 points each it is. HOWEVER, in order to keep things interesting, on Wednesday (along with clues) I will offer one additional bonus question for an additional 101 points (no clue deduction for the bonus). This means that Scraps' lead becomes a touch more vulnerable. It won't be a lightning round -- you'll email your answer along with everything else by the Thursday midnight deadline. I'll admit it's rotten of me to throw such surprises in, but if you don't like it, you can go play that high-minded quiz at the Platypus Dossier.

On to the questions. Email your answers to quiz at wombatfile dot com by 12:01 AM EST, THURSDAY, December 23rd. Clues and the bonus will be posted on Wednesday morning -- answers received after the clue will score only half-credit (51 points), though the bonus will yield a full 101.

As this is the last gasp, I couldn't help but be long-winded in a traditionally Friday style. If clarifications (not hints) are required for any of the four, note in the comments and I'll address if necessary.

ROUND THREE QUESTIONS:

1. In 1818, New York City mayor Cadwallader Colden noted that "our wives and daughters cannot walk abroad through the streets of the city without encountering the most disgusting spectacles," although he admitted that the objects of his complaint were merely "indulging in the propensities of nature." He also complained about their possible danger to the young. He empanelled a grand jury which indicted one tradesman, Christian Harriet, as kind of an example case, charging him with public nuisance for contributing to this problem. Harriet's lawyer argued that his client was only following a common social practice, and while the overly refined might feel "too delicate to endure the sight, or even the idea of so odious a creature," the poor would be unduly harmed by the enforcement of this law.

Harriet, though, was convicted under pressure from the mayor, thus establishing that anyone who did what he did was violating the law. Three years later, the Common Council ordered a roundup of the offending objects, but the owners rioted and liberated their property. Riots over this law broke out four more times from 1825 to 1832.

What did Mayor Colden want to get off the streets?

2. In 1797, the following poem was published in The Monthly Magazine and signed "Nehemiah Higginbottom," in a style borrowing the phrases of and clearly ridiculing the style of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

And this reft house is that the which he built,
Lamented Jack ! And here his malt he pil'd,
Cautious in vain ! These rats that squeak so wild,
Squeak, not unconscious of their father's guilt.
Did ye not see her gleaming thro' the glade ?
Belike, 'twas she, the maiden all forlorn.
What though she milk no cow with crumpled horn,
Yet aye she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd ;
And aye beside her stalks her amorous knight !
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white ;
As when thro' broken clouds at night's high noon
Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon !

Higginbottom also published two other parody sonnets (targeting other poets) in the same issue.

What was "Nehemiah Higginbottom"'s real name?

3. In 1784, a British Army Lieutenant first proposed a weapons innovation that would in future make warfare much more deadly, but his efforts to convince superiors went unheeded. He spent the next nineteen years making demonstrations before the army finally ordered him to oversee the manufacture of his innovation. It was used in a naval battle in 1804 to such great effect that the enemy surrendered after the British fired their opening rounds. That year, he was promoted to Lietenant Colonel. His innovation was soon used in widespread fashion, and has been credited as a factor in the victory over Napoleon.

His innovation had a name which he gave it, but was unofficially known simply by his last name, and the British government actually formalized the designation in 1852, after his death, at the request of his family. Although the descendents of his innovation work differently, his name lives on in military terminology, and has come to be well known outside the military, and survives in frequent contemporary news coverage about the war in Iraq.

What was his last name?

4. James Pierpont was born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1822. He ran away from home at a young age, and is rumored to have gone to sea and/or gone to California in the Gold Rush. He turned up in the late 1850s in Savannah, Georgia as music director and organist at a Unitarian church where his brother John was the minister. Although his family was abolitionist, when war came he joined a Confederate calvary regiment.

He wrote pro-Confederacy songs, such as "We Conquer or Die" and "Strike for the South," but none of these caught on like a song he copyrighted in 1857, while in Savannah (although some sources suggest he first composed it elsewhere, more than a decade before that). Unlike those up-the-rebels tunes, it is absolutely apolitical and not at all identified with Pierpont's adopted home. Its original title, which referred to a vehicle, was later changed to something more catchy (a lyric from the chorus).

What is the revised title, by which this song is now widely known?