ominent part.
When my next-door neighbor reflected so long, clutching his forehead
between his hands, he was trying to discover the hidden meaning of his
own hieroglyphics; he saw the ghostly translation of his sums dancing in
space. What did he perceive? How would the alphabetical signs, arranged
first in one and then in another manner, give an image of the actual
things, an image visible to the eyes of the mind alone? It beat me.

'I shall have to learn analytical geometry some day,' I said. 'Will you
help me?'

'I'm quite willing,' he replied, with a smile in which I read his lack
of confidence in my determination.

No matter; we struck a bargain that same evening. We would together
break up the stubble of algebra and analytical geometry, the foundation
of the mathematical degree; we would make common stock: he would bring
long hours of calculation, I my youthful ardor. We would begin as soon
as I had finished with my arts degree, which was my main preoccupation
for the moment.

In those far off days it was the rule to make a little serious literary
study take precedence of science. You were expected to be familiar
with the great minds of antiquity, to converse with Horace and Virgil,
Theocritus and Plato, before touching the poisons of chemistry or the
levers of mechanics. The niceties of thought could only be the gainers
by these preparations. Life's exigencies, ever harsher as progress
afflicts us with its increasing needs, have changed all that. A fig for
correct language! Business before all!

This modern hurry would have suited my impatience. I confess that I
fumed against the regulation which forced Latin and Greek upon me before
allowing me to open up relations with the sine and cosine. Today, wiser,
ripened by age and experience, I am of a different opinion. I very much
regret that my modest literary studies were not more carefully conducted
and further prolonged. To fill up this enormous blank a little, I
respectfully returned, somewhat late in life, to those good old books
which are usually sold second-hand with their leaves hardly cut.
Venerable pages, annotated in pencil during the long evenings of my
youth, I have found you again and you are more than ever my friends. You
have taught me that an obligation rests upon whoever wields the pen: he
must have something to say that is capable of interesting us. When
the subject comes within the scope of natural science, the interest is
nearly always assur