142 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Studious, persistent familiarity with noble letters will place you among 

 the knowing, and it is worth all the effort it can possibly cost you. It 

 will give you, if not the ideal education, a real education, broad, full, 

 useful, enjoyable, a fortune which wealth could not buy. It will keep 

 you from being a boor and make you a cultivated person instead. You 

 may grow to be a connoisseur, a critic, an authority in some department 

 of literature, philosophy, art or science. If you persist, though no 

 degree ever crown your attainments, you may yet be able to instruct 

 masters and doctors. Short of this, the possibilities of profit from 

 reading are indefinitely rich and great. It is a sort of mental suicide 

 if we neglect them. 



In these last words, to make the argument specially strong, we have 

 been supposing the case of the people who possess little or no school 

 training. But such as have enjoyed that training, however long, ought 

 nevertheless to appreciate the advantages of reading. If familiarity 

 with books can not take the place of mental drill, no more, certainly, 

 can mental drill take the place of familiarity with books. If you 

 already possess a good foundation laid in school build upon it by read- 

 ing. The chances of profiting in this way ought to impress you as 

 much as if you had been less fortunate in respect to schooling. 



The existence of low-cost editions and of excellent translations of 

 good books, made accessible through free libraries and otherwise, is 

 calculated to bring to bear upon us all a moving incentive to read. If 

 we yield to this incentive, whoever we are and whatever mental advan- 

 tages we may have enjoyed hitherto, the result will be invaluable mental 

 cultivation and improvement. 



Some one will interpose : " I do not love to read ; it is a bore. I 

 hate books. If I am to get good from reading you must tell me how 

 I may develop interest in them." 



How sad the confession that one does not love to read. Compare 

 Edward Gibbon's avowal that he would not exchange his love of reading 

 for all the gold of the Indies. 



Two sorts of people avoid reading, those with very little intelligence 

 and those possessing such unusual intelligence and originality that 

 their minds keep busy without external stimulus. The dull ones can 

 not perhaps be helped much ; the others need only proper direction in 

 order to find good reading a perpetual delight. 



An intelligent person who dislikes reading is nearly sure to be 

 deeply interested in something; in games, in hunting, in some kind of 

 animals or sort of mechanism. Get a first-rate book discussing his 

 hobby and see if you can not bait his taste therewith. Most likely he 

 will read that and call for another and another. These book? will 

 suggest still others and your man is a reader. 



If all such traps fail, get your proteg^ to read a thrilling short 



