12 ON THE RELATION OF 



nothing more than characterise some of the most general 

 of these differences. 



I have ah-eacly noticed the enormous mass of the 

 materials accumulated by science. It is obvious that 

 the organisation and arrangement of them must be pro- 

 portionately perfect, if we are not to be hopelessly lost in 

 the maze of erudition. One of the reasons why we can 

 so far surpass our predecessors in each individual study 

 is that they have shown us how to organise our know- 

 ledge. 



This organisation consists, in the first place, of a 

 mechanical arrangement of materials, such as is to be 

 found in our catalogues, lexicons, registers, indexes, 

 digests, scientific and literary annuals, systems of natural 

 history, and the like. By these appliances thus much 

 at least is gained, that such knowledge as cannot be 

 carried about in the memory is immediately accessible to 

 anyone who wants it. With a good lexicon a school-boy 

 of the present day can achieve results in the interpreta- 

 tion of the classics, which an Erasmus, with the erudition 

 of a lifetime, could hardly attain. Works of this kind 

 form, so to speak, our intellectual principal, with the 

 interest of which we trade ; it is, so to speak, like 

 capital invested in land. The learning buried in cata- 

 logues, lexicons, and indexes looks as bare and uninviting 

 as the soil of a farm ; the uninitiated cannot see or ap- 

 preciate the labour and capital already invested there ; 

 to them the work of the ploughman seems infinitely 

 dull, weary, and monotonous. But though the compiler 

 of a lexicon or of a system of natural history must be 

 prepared to encounter labour as weary and as obstinate 

 as the ploughman's, yet it need not be supposed that his 

 work is of a low type, or that it is by any means as dry 

 and mechanical as it looks when we have it before us in 

 black and white. In this, as in any other sort of scien- 



