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 - L - .
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 10 - l - .
Catalogue was in my mind - I did make a
rough pencil one - and I still think that a 10 - l - . 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 philosophers, 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 10 - l - . 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.
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