ed, "Studiosus."

In writing the book he got an education--to find out about a thing,
write a book on it. Pliny returned to Rome and began the practise of
law, and developed into a special pleader of marked power. He still held
his commission in the army, and was sent on various diplomatic errands
to Spain, Africa, Germany, Gaul and Greece. If you want things done,
call on a busy man: the man of leisure has no spare time.

Pliny's jottings on natural history very soon resolved themselves into
the most ambitious plan, which up to that time had not been attempted by
man--he would write out and sum up all human knowledge.

The next man to try the same thing was Alexander von Humboldt. We now
have Pliny's "Natural History" in thirty-seven volumes. His other forty
volumes are lost. The first volume of the "Natural History," which was
written last, gives a list of the authors consulted. Aristotle and
Theophrastus take the places of honor, and then follow a score of names
of men whose works have perished and whom we know mostly through what
Pliny says about them. So not only does Pliny write science as he saw
it, but introduces us into a select circle of authors whom otherwise we
would not know. We have the world of Nature, but we would not have this
world of thinkers, were it not for Pliny.

Pliny even quotes Sappho, who loved and sung, and whose poems reached us
only through scattered quotations, as if Emerson's works should perish
and we would revive him through a file of "The Philistine" magazine.
Pliny and Paul were contemporaries. Pliny lived at Rome when Paul lived
there in his own hired house, but Pliny never mentioned him, and
probably never heard of him.

One man was interested in this world, the other in the next.

Pliny begins his great work with a plagiarism on Lyman Abbott, "There is
but one God." The idea that there were many arose out of the thought
that because there were many things, there must be special gods to look
after them: gods of the harvest, gods of the household, gods of the
rain, etc.

There is but one God, says Pliny, and this God manifests Himself in
Nature. Nature and Nature's work are one. This world and all other
worlds we see or can think of are parts of Nature. If there are other
Universes, they are natural; that is to say, a part of Nature. God rules
them all according to laws which He Himself can not violate. It is vain
to supplicate Him, and absurd to worship Him, for to do these t