owledge. Let him
buy second-hand books rather than read their contents in new ones. To
be sure, it is easy to add to any new discovery--_inventis aliquid
addere facile est_; and, therefore, the student, after well mastering
the rudiments of his subject, will have to make himself acquainted
with the more recent additions to the knowledge of it. And, in
general, the following rule may be laid down here as elsewhere: if a
thing is new, it is seldom good; because if it is good, it is only for
a short time new.

What the address is to a letter, the title should be to a book; in
other words, its main object should be to bring the book to those
amongst the public who will take an interest in its contents. It
should, therefore, be expressive; and since by its very nature it must
be short, it should be concise, laconic, pregnant, and if possible
give the contents in one word. A prolix title is bad; and so is one
that says nothing, or is obscure and ambiguous, or even, it may be,
false and misleading; this last may possibly involve the book in the
same fate as overtakes a wrongly addressed letter. The worst titles
of all are those which have been stolen, those, I mean, which have
already been borne by other books; for they are in the first place a
plagiarism, and secondly the most convincing proof of a total lack of
originality in the author. A man who has not enough originality to
invent a new title for his book, will be still less able to give it
new contents. Akin to these stolen titles are those which have been
imitated, that is to say, stolen to the extent of one half; for
instance, long after I had produced my treatise _On Will in Nature_,
Oersted wrote a book entitled _On Mind in Nature_.

A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's
thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in _the matter about
which he has thought_, or in the _form_ which his thoughts take, in
other words, _what it is that he has thought about it._

The matter of books is most various; and various also are the several
excellences attaching to books on the score of their matter. By matter
I mean everything that comes within the domain of actual experience;
that is to say, the facts of history and the facts of nature, taken in
and by themselves and in their widest sense. Here it is the _thing_
treated of, which gives its peculiar character to the book; so that a
book can be important, whoever it was that wrote it.

But in