collection of having once, in these nutting excursions of mine, been
excessively eloquent on the subject of the advantages derivable from
division of labour.

Not a walk or condition in life is there to which it has not
penetrated; and while natural talents have become cultivated from
finding their most congenial sphere of operation, immense results have
accrued in every art and science where a higher degree of perfection
has been thus attained. Your doctor and your lawyer now-a-days select
the precise portion of your person or property they intend to operate
on. The oculist and the aurist, and the odontalgist and the
pedicurist, all are suggestive of various local sufferings, by which
they bound their skill; and so, the equity lawyer and the common-law
lawyer, the special pleader and the bar orator, have subdivided
knavery, without diminishing its amount. Even in literature, there are
the heavy men who "do" the politics, and the quiet men who do the
statistics, and the rough-and-ready men, who are a kind of
servants-of-all-work, and so on. In universities, there is the science
man and the classical man, the man of simple equations and the man of
spondees. Painting has its bright colourists and its more
sombre-loving artists, and so on--the great camps of party would seem
to have given the impulse to every condition of life, and "speciality"
is the order of the day.

No sooner is a new discovery made, no matter whether in the skies
above, or the dark bowels of the earth, than an opportunity of
disagreement is sure to arise. Two, mayhap three, gentlemen, profess
diversity of opinion; followers are never lacking, let any one be fool
enough to turn leader--and straightway there comes out a new sect,
with a Greek name for a title.

It is only the other day, men began to find out that primitive rocks,
and basalt, ochre, and sandstone, had lived a long time, and must
surely know something of antiquity--if they only could tell it. The
stones, from that hour, had an unhappy time of it--men went about in
gangs with hammers and crowbars, shivering this and shattering
that--picking holes in respectable old rocks, that never had a word
said against them, and peeping into "quarts,"[1] like a policeman.

[1] Query "quartz."--_Devil._

Men must be quarrelsome, you'd say, if they could fight about
paving-stones--but so they did. One set would have it that the world
was all cinders, and another set insisted it was only slack--