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 
