of the mental retina
spreads its darkness, as, for example, in the affirmation that as
oxygen and hydrogen are reciprocally convertible with water, so are
water, ammonia, and carbolic acid convertible into and resolvable from
living protoplasm!--a statement said to be as false in chemistry as it
certainly is in physiology. An ordinary merchant's accountant will, if
need be, work a week to correct in his trial balance the variation of
a cent. But when he listens to Sir John Lubbock calmly reckoning the
age of the human implements in the valley of the Somme at from one
hundred thousand up to two hundred and forty thousand years; when he
sees Croll, in dating the close of the glacial age, leap down from the
height of near eight hundred thousand to eighty thousand years; when
he finds Darwin and Lyell claiming for the period of life on the earth
more than three hundred millions of years, while Tait and Thompson
pronounce it 'utterly impossible' to grant more than ten, or, at most,
fifteen millions,--this poor, benighted clerk is bound to sit and
hearken to his masters in all outward solemnity, but he must be
excused for a prolonged inward smile. Who are these, he says, that
reckon with a lee-way of hundreds of thousands of years, and fling the
hundreds of millions of years right and left, like pebbles and straws?

"Brilliancy, so-called, is no equivalent or substitute for precision.
It is often its worst enemy. A man may mould himself to think in
curves and zig-zags, and not in right lines. He sends never an arrow,
but a boomerang. Or he thinks in poetry instead of prose, deals in
analogy where it should be analysis, puts rhetoric for logic, scatters
and not concentrates, and while he radiates never irradiates. A late
divine was suspected of heresy, partly because of his poetic bias; and
one of his volumes was unfortunate for him and his readers, in that
for his central position he planted himself on a figure of speech, and
not on a logical proposition. The well-known story _se non vero e ben
trovato_, of that keenest of lawyers, listening to a lecture of which
every sentence was a gem and every paragraph rich with the spoils of
literature, and replying to the question, "Do you understand all
that?" "No, but my daughters do." It was as beautiful and iridescent
as the Staubbach, and as impalpable.

"The more is the pity when a vigorous mind, in the outset of some
great discussion, heads for a fog-bank or a wind-mill. When a