and immediately it rushes towards us across the distance, like
something seen through a telescope. No doubt to the pigeon-fancier
this would seem but the first lisping of knowledge, and he would not
think much of our acquaintance with pigeons if we could not tell a
carrier from a pouter. That is the charm of knowledge--it is merely a
door into another sort of ignorance. There are always new differences
to be discovered, new names to be learned, new individualities to be
known, new classifications to be made. The world is so full of a
number of things that no man with a grain of either poetry or the
scientific spirit in him has any right to be bored, though he lived
for a thousand years. Terror or tragedy may overwhelm him, but boredom
never. The infinity of things forbids it. I once heard of a tipsy
young artist who, on his way home on a beautiful night, had his
attention called by a maudlin friend to the stars, where they twinkled
like a million larks. He raised his eyes to the heavens, then shook
his head. "There are too many of them," he complained wearily. It
should be remembered, however, that he was drunk, and that he did not
know astronomy. There could be too many stars only if they were all
turned out on the same pattern, and made the same pattern on the sky.
Fortunately, the universe is the creation not of a manufacturer but of
an artist.

There is scarcely a subject that does not contain sufficient Asias of
differences to keep an explorer happy for a lifetime. It would be easy
to do nothing but chase butterflies all one's days. It is said that
thirteen thousand species of butterflies have been already discovered,
and it is suggested that there may be nearly twice as many that have
so far escaped the naturalists. After so monstrous a figure, we are
not surprised to learn that there are sixty-eight species of
butterflies in Great Britain and Ireland. We should be astonished,