NATURE AND BOOKS. 31 



thoughts of man are like the foraminifera, those minute 

 shells which build up the solid chalk hills and lay the 

 level plain of endless sand ; so minute that, save with 

 a powerful lens, you would never imagine the dust on 

 your fingers to be more than dust The thoughts of 

 man are like these : each to him seems great in his day, 

 but the ages roll, and they shrink till they become 

 triturated dust, and you might, as it were, put a thousand 

 on your thumb-nail. They are not shapeless dust for all 

 that ; they are organic, and they build and weld and 

 grow together, till in the passage of time they will make 

 a new earth and a new life. So I think I may say there 

 are no books ; the books are yet to be written. 



Let us get a little alchemy out of the dandelions. 

 They were not precise, the Arabian sages, with their 

 flowing robes and handwriting ; there was a large 

 margin to their manuscripts, much imagination. Therein 

 they failed, judged by the monograph standard, but gave 

 a subtle food for the mind. Some of this I would fain 

 see now inspiring the works and words of our great men 

 of science and thought — a little alchemy. A great 

 change is slowly going forward all over the printing- 

 press world, I mean wherever men print books and 

 papers. The Chinese are perhaps outside that world at 

 present, and the other Asian races ; the myriads, too, of 

 the great southern islands and of Africa. The change 

 is steadily, however, proceeding wherever the printing- 

 press is used. Nor Pope, nor Kaiser, nor Czar, nor 

 Sultan, nor fanatic monk, nor muezzin, shouting in vain 

 from his minaret, nor, most fanatic of all, the fanatic 

 shouting in vain in London, can keep it out — all power- 

 less against a bit of printed paper. Bits of printed 

 paper that listen to no command, to which none can 

 say, * Stand back ; thou shalt not enter.' They rise on 



