as the ashes of the Alexandrian library, or the worms in
any parchments that may have survived that conflagration.

"Whew!" was his ejaculation; "I didn't know there was so much."

I dare say not. Most of your limited days have passed under the training
of men who are in the like predicament,--whose notion of the chief end
of man is, to convert lively boys into thick dictionaries,--and who
honestly believe that the chief want of the age is your walking
dictionary. Any other type of humanity, they tell us, "won't pay."
Much they know of what will and what won't pay! This comes of partial
education,--of one-sided, of warped, and biased education. It puts one
out of patience, this arrogance of the University, this presuming
upon the ignorance of the million, this assertion of an indispensable
necessity to make the boy of the nineteenth century a mere expert in
some subdivision of one of the sciences. The obstinacy of an hereditary
absolutism, which the world has outgrown, still lingers in our schools
of learning. Let us admit the divine right of Science, admit the fitness
of a limited number of our youth to become high-priests in her temple,
but no divine right of fossil interpreters of Science to compel the
entire generation to disembowel their sons and make of these living
temples mere receptacles of Roman, Grecian, or Egyptian relics. We
don't believe that "mummy is medicinal," the Arabian doctor Haly to the
contrary notwithstanding. If it ever was, its day has gone by. Therefore
let all sensible people pray for a Cromwell,--not to pull down
University Science, but to set up the Commonwealth of Common Sense, to
subordinate the former to the latter, and to proclaim an education for
our own age and for its exigencies. Your dry-goods jobber stands in
violent contrast to your University man in the matter of practical
adaptation. His knowledge is no affair of dried specimens, but every
particle of it a living knowledge, ready, at a moment's warning, for all
or any of the demands of life.

You are perhaps thinking,--"Yes, that is supposable, because the lessons
learned by the jobber are limited to the common affairs of daily life,
are not prospective; because, belonging only to the passing day, they
are easily surveyed on all sides, and their full use realized at once;
in short, a mere matter of buying and selling goods: a very inferior
thing, as compared with the dignified and scholarly labors of the
student."

How mist