on economic history would be unchanged; but as respects mind and
imagination, the ballad gives the weevil all sorts of significances. The
ballad is a part of the literature of the Southwest.

But I am assigning too many motives of self-improvement to reading.
People read for fun, for pleasure. The literature of the Southwest
affords bully reading.

"If I had read as much as other men, I would know as little," Thomas
Hobbes is credited with having said. A student in the presence of Bishop
E. D. Mouzon was telling about the scores and scores of books he had
read. At a pause the bishop shook his long, wise head and remarked, "My
son, when DO you get time to think?" Two of the best educated men I have
ever had the fortune of talking with were neither schooled nor widely
read. They were extraordinary observers. One was a plainsman, Charles
Goodnight; the other was a borderer, Don Alberto Guajardo, in part
educated by an old Lipan Indian.

But here are the books. I list them not so much to give knowledge as to
direct people with intellectual curiosity and with interest in their own
land to the sources of knowledge; not to create life directly, but to
point out where it has been created or copied. On some of the books I
have made brief observations. Those observations can never be nearly
so important to a reader as the development of his own powers of
observation. With something of an apologetic feeling I confess that I
have read, in my way, most of the books. I should probably have been
a wiser and better informed man had I spent more time out with the
grasshoppers, horned toads, and coyotes. November 5, 1942 J. FRANK DOBIE

2. Interpreters of the Land

"HE'S FOR A JIG or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps." Thought employs
ideas, but having an idea is not the same thing as thinking. A rooster
in a pen of hens has an idea. Thought has never been so popular with
mankind as horse opera, horse play, the main idea behind sheep's eyes.
Far be it from me to feel contempt for people who cannot and do not want
to think. The human species has not yet evolved to the stage at which
thought is natural. I am far more at ease lying in grass and gazing
without thought process at clouds than in sitting in a chair trying to
be logical. Just the same, free play of mind upon life is the essence
of good writing, and intellectual activity is synonymous with critical
interpretations.

To the constant disregard of thought, Americans of the