sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool's
allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a
Frenchman, discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays
which produces a chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone
structures, and statues of metal "are all alike destructively
acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions
of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate
touch of the most subtle of the agencies of the universe." But he
observed that "those bodies which underwent this change during
the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their
original conditions during the hours of night, when this
excitement was no longer influencing them." Hence it has been
inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the
inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic
kingdom." Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives
place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated,
any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part
will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest,
not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against
a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it
supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which
Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this
wild and dusky knowledge--Gramatica parda--tawny grammar, a kind
of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have