918 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 



shall be the elder Pliny, Pliny the naturalist, who lost his life in an eruption of 

 Vesuvius, and whose many virtues were piously described by his nephew, Pliny 

 the younger. The elder Pliny wrote a voluminous Natural History, and left 

 behind him 160 books of unused extracts. His appetite for reading was 

 insatiable. Reading filled all the hours which could be spared from public 

 duties or snatched from sleep. Once, when a friend interrupted the reader to 

 correct a mispronunciation, Pliny asked, ' Did you not understand ? ' ' Yes.' 

 ' Then why did you interrupt ? You have made us lose ten lines.' The Natural 

 History compiled during- years of such reading is wholly uncritical ; any testimony 

 is good enough for the most improbable story. We look in vain lor interpretation, 

 combination, or inference. The facts are indeed rudely sorted, usually according 

 to subjects, but sometimes alphabetically. The chief use of Pliny's Natural 

 History has been to promote the fabrication of more books of the same kind. 



Pliny, with bis unlimited appetite for knowledge and his very limited power 

 of using it, mighUseem to have been taken as a pattern by scholars. Like him, 

 they have amassed knowledge in heaps. It has been the ambition of many 

 scholars to read eyerything that was worth reading, and to fill great volumes 

 with the imperfectly digested fragments. 



In the ages of learning, the schoolmaster too became a pedant. His chief 

 duty he supposed to consist in furnishing his boys with knowledge which they 

 might some day want. If it were not that Nature has endowed schoolboy's with 

 a healthy power of resistance, their memories might have come to resemble the 

 houses of those who believe that whenever they throw a thing away they are 

 sure to want it again — houses in which room after room is so packed with 

 antiquated lumber as to be uninhabitable. 



The llenaissauce called up men who made a vigorous protest against unused 

 learning. liabelais put into grotesque Latin his opinion that the most learned 

 scholars may be far from the wisest of men.^ Montaigne said over again in 

 pointed phrases what common-sense people had been saying for ages, that he who 

 knows most is not always he who knows best; that undigested food does not 

 nourish ; that memory-knowledge is not properly knowledge at all.- Erasmus 

 wondered at the practical ignorance of the scholars of his own days — ' Incredibile 

 quam nibil intelligat litteratorum vulgus.' Locke refused the name of knowledge 

 to book-learning ; real knowledge, he held, was mental vision In the educated 

 man he valued virtue, wisdom, and breeding (manners), ranking them in this 

 order ; learning came last of all.^ 



Happily for us, a great deal that we once knew and might foolishly wish to 

 keep quickly fades from the memory. I picture to myself a stream gliding past, 

 and bearing along a miscellany of facts any of which may possibly be useful at 

 some future time. Now and then we stretch out a hand and grasp something 

 which takes our fancy. In nine cases out of ten we drop it immediately. Only 

 a small fraction of the knowledge which enters the mind of an inquisitive person 

 is kepr for so long as a month. 



What we remember so greatly exceeds what we can use that we need not 

 deeply regret the loss that is alsvays going on. When people explain to us how 

 much valuable substance is wasted by want of care in selecting and preparing our 

 food, I reflect that all of us consume twice or thrice as much food as we can do 

 any good with, and then I am consoled. It is not nearly so necessary to know 

 more things as to know them better, to know what to do with them. 



No doubt we often find it necessary to recall a multitude of small facts, in 

 order, it may be, to elicit a general conclusion or to produce a telling argument. 

 But is it wise to prepare years in advance by storing all the facts in the memory ? 

 I cannot think so. The study of the bodies of animals teaches us that muscle and 



' ' Magis magnos clericos non sunt magis magnos sapientes ' (Frere Jean des 

 Eiitommevres in Gargatitva, i. 39). 



^ Esmis, i. XXV. 



^ Rabslais, Montaigne, and Locke have been collated by Quick in his edition of 

 the Tlwvghts concerning Education. 



