"Merchants, Arise,
And Mingle Conscience With Your Merchandise."
Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before
they write another.
Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat
and potatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the
Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely,
as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into
brandy. Books are for the most part wilfully and hastily
written, as parts of a system, to supply a want real or imagined.
Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or
inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the
least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or
rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to
conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the
professors always dwell.
"To Athens gowned he goes, and from that school
Returns unsped, a more instructed fool."
They teach the elements really of ignorance, not of knowledge,
for, to speak deliberately and in view of the highest truths, it
is not easy to distinguish elementary knowledge. There is a
chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science
can never span. A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses
of _terra firma_, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art
of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.
_They_ must not yield wheat and potatoes, but must themselves be
the unconstrained and natural harvest of their author's lives.
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