have viewed when they were all a tangle of wild flowers, and plants that are now scarce were common, and the old ploughs, and the curious customs, and the wild red-deer-it would make a good picture, it really would, Gerard studying English orchids! Such a volume hundreds of pages, yellow of course, close type, and marvellously well printed. The minute care they must have taken in those early days of printing to get up such a book-a wonderful volume both in bodily shape and contents. Just then the only copy I could hear of was much damaged. The cunning old bookseller said he could make it up; but I have no fancy for patched books, they are not genuine; I would rather have them deficient; and the price was rather long, and so I went Gerardless. Of folk-lore and medicinal use and history and associations here you have hints. The bottom of the sack is not yet; there are the monographs, years of study expended upon one species of plant growing in one locality, perhaps; some made up into thick books and some into broad quarto pamphlets, with most beautiful plates, that, if you were to see them, would tempt you to cut them out and steal them, all sunk and lost like dead ships under the sand piles of monographs. There are warehouses in London that are choked to the beams of the roof with them, and every fresh exploration furnishes another shelf-load. The source of the Nile was unknown a very few years ago, and now, I have no doubt, there are dozens of monographs on the flowers that flourish there. Indeed, there is not a thing that grows that may not furnish a monograph. The author spends perhaps twenty years in collecting his material, during which time he must of course come across a great variety of amusing information, and then he spends another ten years writing out a fair copy of his labors. Then he thinks it does not quite do in that form, so he snips a paragraph out of the beginning and puts it at the end; next he shifts some more matter from the middle to the preface; then he thinks it over. It seems to him that it is too big, it wants condensation. The scientific world will say he has made too much of it; it ought to read very slight, and present

the facts while concealing the labor. So he sets about removing the superfluous,-leaves out all the personal observations, and all the little adventures he has met with in his investigations; and so, having got it down to the dry bones and stones thereof, and omitted all the mortar that stuck them together, he sends for the engraver, and the next three years are occupied in working up the illustrations. About this time some new discovery is made by a foreign observer, which necessitates a complete revision of the subject, and so having shifted the contents of the book about hither and thither till he does not know which is the end and which is the beginning, he pitches the much-mutilated copy into a drawer and turns the key. Farewell, no more of this; his declining days shall be spent in peace. A few months afterward a work is announced in Leipsic which "really trenches on my favorite subject, and really after spending a lifetime I can't stand it." By this time his handwriting has become so shaky he can hardly read it himself, so he sends in despair for a lady who works a type-writer, and with infinite patience she makes a clean manuscript of the muddled mass. last, and the proofs come rapidly. Such a relief! How joyfully easy a thing is when you set about it, but by-and-by this won't do. Sub-section A ought to be in a foot-note, family B is doubtful; and so the corrections grow and run over the margin in a thin treble hand, till they approach the bulk of the original book-a good profit for the printer; and so after about forty years the monograph is published-the work of a life is accomplished. Fifty copies are sent round to as many public libraries and learned societies, and the rest of the impression lies on the shelves till dust and time and spiders' webs have buried it. Splendid work in it too. Looked back upon from to-day with the key of modern thought, these monographs often contain a whole chest of treasure. And still there are the periodicals, a century of magazines and journals and reviews and notices that have been coming out these hundred years and dropping to the ground like dead leaves unnoticed. And then there are the art works-books about shape and color and ornament,

To the press at

and a naturalist lately has been trying to see how the leaves of one tree look fitted on the boughs of another. Boundless is the wealth of Flora's lap; the ingenuity of man has been weaving wreaths out of it for ages, and still the bottom of the sack is not yet. Nor have we got much news of the dandelion. For I sit on the thrown timber under the trees and meditate, and I want something more: I want the soul of the flowers.

The bee and the butterfly take their pollen and their honey, and the strange moths so curiously colored, like the curious coloring of the owls, come to them by night, and they turn toward the sun and live their little day, and their petals fall, and where is the soul when the body decays? I want the inner meaning and the understanding of the wild flowers in the meadow. Why are they? What end, what purpose? The plant knows, and sees, and feels; where is its mind when the petal falls? Absorbed in the universal dynamic force, or what? They make no shadow of pretence, these beautiful flowers, of being beautiful for my sake, of bearing honey for me; in short, there does not seem to be any kind of relationship between us, and yet as I said just nowlanguage does not express the dumb feelings of the mind any more than the flower can speak. I want to know the soul of the flowers, but the word soul does not in the smallest degree convey the meaning of my wish. It is quite inadequate; I must hope that you will grasp the drift of my meaning. All these life-labored monographs, these classifications, works of Linnæus, and our own classic Darwin, microscope, physiology, and the flower has not given us its message yet. There are a million books; there are no books: all the books have to be written. What a field! A whole million of books have got to be written. In this sense there are hardly a dozen of them done, and these mere primers. The thoughts of man are like the foraminifera, those minute shells which build up the solid chalk hills and lay the level plain of endless sand; so minute that, save with a powerful lens, you would never imagine the dust on your fingers to be more than dust. The thoughts of man are

like these: each to him seems great in his day, but the ages roll, and they shrink till they become triturated dust, and you might, as it were, put a thousand on your thumb-nail. They are not shapeless dust for all that; they are organic, and they build and weld and grow together, till in the passage of time they will make a new earth and a new life. So I think I may say there are no books; the books are yet to be written.

Let us get a little alchemy out of the dandelions. They were not precise, the Arabian sages, with their flowing robes and handwriting; there was a large margin to their manuscripts, much imagination. Therein they failed, judged by the monograph standard, but gave a subtle food for the mind. Some of this I would fain see now inspiring the works and words of our great men of science and thought-a little alchemy. A great change is slowly going forward all over the printing-press world-I mean wherever men print books and papers. The Chinese are perhaps outside that world at present, and the other Asian races; the myriads, too, of the great Southern Islands and of Africa. The change is steadily, however, proceeding wherever the printing-press is used. Nor Pope, nor Kaiser, nor Czar, nor Sultan, nor fanatic monk, nor muezzin, shouting in vain from his minaret, nor, most fanatic of all, the fanatic shouting in vain in London, can keep it out-all powerless against a bit of printed paper. Bits of printed paper that listen to no command, to which none can say, Stand back; thou shalt not enter." They rise on the summer whirlwinds from the very dust of the road, and float over the highest walls; they fall on the well-kept lawns

monastery, prison, palace-there is no fortress against a bit of printed paper. They penetrate where even Danae's gold cannot go. Our Darwins, our Lyalls, Herschels, Faradays-all the immense army of those that go down to nature with considering eye-are steadfastly undermining and obliterating the superstitious past, literally burying it under endless loads of accumulated facts, and the printing-presses, like so many Argos, take these facts on their voyage round the world. Over go temples, and minarets, and churches, or rather there they stay, the hollow shells, like the snail

shells which thrushes have picked clean; there they stay like Karnac, where there is no more incense, like the stone circles on our own hills, where there are no more human sacrifices. Thus men's minds all over the printing-press world are unlearning the falsehoods that have bound them down so long; they are unlearning, the first step to learn. They are going down to nature and taking up the clods with their own hands, and so coming to have touch of that which is real. As yet we are in the fact stage, by-and-by we shall come to the alchemy and get the honey for the inner mind and soul. I found, therefore, from the dandelion that there were no books, and it came upon me, believe me, as a great surprise, for I had lived quite certain that I was surrounded with them. is nothing but unlearning, I find now; five thousand books to unlearn.

It

Then to unlearn the first ideas of history, of science, of social institutions, to unlearn one's own life and purpose; to unlearn the old mode of thought and way of arriving at things; to take off peel after peel, and so get by degrees slowly toward the truth-thus writing, as it were, a sort of floating book in the mind, almost re-making the soul. It seems as if the chief value of books is to give us something to unlearn. Sometimes I feel indignant at the false views that were instilled into me in early days, and then again I see that that very indignation gives me a moral life. I hope in the days to come future thinkers will unlearn us and find ideas infinitely bet

ter.

How marvellous it seems that there should be found communities furnished with the printing-press and fully convinced they are more intelligent than ants, and yet deliberately refusing by a solid "popular" vote to accept free libraries! They look with scorn on the mediæval times, when volumes were chained in the college library or to the desk at church. Ignorant times those! A good thing it would be if only three books were chained to a desk, open and free in every parish throughout the kingdom now. So might the wish to unlearn be at last started in the inert mind of the mass. Almost the only books left to me to read, and not to unlearn very much, are my first books-the graven classics of Greece and Rome, cut with a

stylus so deeply into the tablet they cannot be erased. Little of the monograph or of classification, no bushel baskets full of facts, no minute dissection of nature, no attempt to find the soul under the scalpel. Thoughts which do not exactly deal with nature direct in a mechanical way, as the chemist labels all his gums and spices and earths in small boxes-I wonder if anybody at Athens ever made a collection of the coleoptera? Yet in some way they had got the spirit of the earth and sea, the soul of the sun. This never dies; this I wish not to unlearn; this is ever fresh and beautiful as a summer morning :

"Such the golden crocus,

--

Fair flower of early spring; the gopher white, And fragrant thyme, and all the unsown beauty Which in moist grounds the verdant meadows bear:

The ox-eye, the sweet smelling flower of Jove, The chalca, and the much-sung hyacinth, And the low-growing violet, to which Dark Proserpine a darker hue has given." They come nearest to our own violets and cowslips-the unsown beauty of our meadows-to the hawthorn leaf and the high pine-wood. I can forget all else that I have read, but it is difficult to forget these even when I will. I read them in English. I had the usual Latin. and Greek instruction, but I read them in English deliberately. For the inflexion of the vowel I care nothing; I prize the idea. Scholars may regard me with scorn. I reply with equal scorn. I say that a great classic thought is greater to an English mind in English words than in any other form, and therein fits best to this our life and day. I read them in English first, and intend to do so to the end. I do not know what set me on these books, but I began them when about eighteen. The first of all was Diogenes Laertius's "Lives of the Philosophers.'' It was a happy choice; my good genius, I suppose, for you see I was already fairly well read in modern science, and these old Greek philosophies set me thinking backward, unwinding and unlearning, and getting at that eidolon which is not to be found in the mechanical heavens of this age. I still read him. I still find new things, quite new, because they are so very, very old, and quite true; and with his help I seem in a measure to look back upon our thoughts now as if I had pro

jected myself a thousand years forward in space. An imperfect book, say the critics. I do not know about that; his short paragraphs and chapters in their imperfect state convey more freshness to the mind than the thick, labored volumes in which modern scholarship professes to describe ancient philosophy. I prefer the imperfect original records. Neither can I read the ponderous volumes of modern history, which are nothing but words. I prefer the incomplete and shattered chronicles themselves, where the swords shine and the armor rings, and all is life though but a broken frieze Next came Plato (it took me a long time to read Plato, and I have had to unlearn much of him) and Xenophon. Socrates' dialectic method taught me .how to write, or rather how to put ideas in sequence. Sophocles, too; and last, that wonderful encyclopædia of curious things, Athenæus. So that I found, So that I found, when the idea of the hundred best books came out, that between seventy and eighty of them had been my companions almost from boyhood, those lacking to complete the number being chiefly ecclesiastical or continental. Indeed, some years before the hundred books were talked of, the idea had occurred to me of making up a catalogue of books that could be bought for ten pounds. In an article in the Pall Mall Gazette on The Pigeons at the British Museum I said: It seems as if all the books in the world-really books-can be bought for £10. Man's whole thought is purchasable at that small price-for the value of a watch—of a good dog." The idea of making a £ro catalogue was in my mind—I did make a rough pencil one-and I still think that a £ro library is worth the notice of the publishing world. My rough list did not contain a hundred. These old books of nature and nature's mind ought to be chained up, free for every man to read in every parish. These are the only books I do not wish to unlearn, one item only excepted, which I shall not here discuss. It is curious, too, that the Greek philos

64

ophers, in the more rigid sense of science, anticipated most of the drift of modern thought. Two chapters in Aristotle might almost be printed without change as summaries of our present natural science. For the facts of nature, of course, neither one hundred books nor a £io library would be worth mentioning; say five thousand, and having read those, then go to Kew, and spend a year studying the specimens of wood only stored there, such a little slice after all of the whole. You will then believe what I have advanced, that there are no books as yet; they have got to be written; and if we pursue the idea a little further, and consider that these are all about the crude clods of life-for I often feel what a very crude and clumsy clod I am-only of the earth, a minute speck among one hundred millions of stars, how shall we write what is there? It is only to be written by the mind or soul, and that is why I strive so much to find what I have called the alchemy of nature. Let us not be too entirely mechanical, Baconian, and experimental only; let us let the soul hope and dream and float on these oceans of accumulated facts and feel still greater aspiration than it has ever known since first a flint was chipped before the glaciers. Man's mind is the most important fact with which we are yet acquainted. Let us not turn then against it and deny its existence with too many brazen instruments, but remember these are but a means, and that the vast lens of the Californian refractor is but glass-it is the infinite speck upon which the ray of light will fall that is the one great fact of the universe. By the mind, without instruments, the Greeks anticipated almost all our thoughts; by-and-by, having raised ourselves up upon these huge mounds of facts we shall begin to see still greater things; to do so we must look not at the mound under foot but at the starry horizon.-Fortnightly Review.

IN a noteworthy address on "Laissezfaire and Government Interference, given by Mr. Goschen a year or two ago at Edinburgh, occurs the following passage :

"How is it, I have often asked myself, that while the increasing democracy at home is insisting with such growing eagerness on more control by the State, we see so small a corresponding development of the same principle in the United States, or in Anglo-Saxon colonies? It is clearly not simply the democratic spirit, which demands so much central regulation. Otherwise we should find the same conditions in the Anglo-Saxon democracies across the seas. Other causes must be at work in the United Kingdom. On the one hand, the philanthropic and sensitive element is always in finitely stronger in the old country; and, on

the other hand, its civilization is more complex,

more crowded, more honeycombed with anomalies, more running into extremes. The colonies have more breathing space. There, individual energy can expand with less encroachments on neighbors' interests. There, movement is freer, and the first instinct of man for untrammelled liberty, confidence in himself, and in his power to shift for himself, and hold his own, have not yet yielded to the acquired taste for that regulation, control, interference, and inspection with which the most

independent-minded nation in the world is rapidly being inoculated as an outcome of the

latest form of its civilization."

Mr. Goschen's view of the comparative prevalence of laissez-faire as a practical rule in the United States, is not only very generally entertained in England, but would also be allowed to pass unchallenged by the great majority of intelligent Americans. How it happens that this opinion-which I do not regard as at all in keeping with plain facts and marked tendencies-is so commonly received, may be worth a little incidental discussion. Doubtless there are several reasons why it should be supposed that a non-interference régime is jealously maintained in the United States, and especially in the Western States. It would seem to harmonize with the selfrelying, independent character of the American citizen-sovereign, whose personal freedom and self-directed activities are his dearest boast. It would seem the only logical régime for a country which has always cherished and reiterated the self-evident truths' of the

old Declaration of Independence, and whose Fourth of July orators have always taught that government is "a necessary evil. The bulk of American economic literature, and the prevailing tone of the press, would sanction the opinion that the laissez-faire policy is pretty consistently practised in the The text books used in United States.

high schools and colleges almost without exception propagate the doctrines of the Manchester school in their baldest form, and teach that the proper functions of government are extremely few and simple. The so-called English political economy has no such doctrinaire America, and no such literature. Prodevotees in the mother country as in fessor Perry, Professor Sumner, Mr. Charles Nordhoff, Mr. David A. Wells, and various other writers of the same school, equally well known in the United States, have had almost the exclusive entrée of American schools, and they are held infallible among the schoolmasters and undergraduates. They teach an easy, axiomatic, à priori sort of economic doctrine that captivates the young student of the Tariff Question and enchants the country schoolmaster by its lucidity and completeness. What these books contain is the "orthodox" laissez-faire political economy, simplified and idealized. And, strange to say, the Protectionists in large part, as well as the Free-traders, abjectly subscribe to this orthodox creed. They are fain to apologize for their protective policy on the ground that there are important practical reasons for this one exceptional departure from the true scientific theory! The bold protection doctrines of Alexander Hamilton and Frederick List, as expounded by Henry C. Carey, Horace Greeley, Peshine Smith, and others, have not held their own against the neat, clean syllogisms of the laissez-faire economists.

The average American has an unequalled capacity for the entertainment of legal fictions and kindred delusions. He lives in one world of theory and in another world of practice, and he de