--Well,--he said,--I am hospitable enough in my feelings to him and all
his tribe. These specialists are the coral-insects that build up a reef.
By and by it will be an island, and for aught we know may grow into a
continent. But I don't want to be a coral-insect myself. I had rather be
a voyager that visits all the reefs and islands the creatures build, and
sails over the seas where they have as yet built up nothing. I am a
little afraid that science is breeding us down too fast into
coral-insects. A man like Newton or Leibnitz or Haller used to paint a
picture of outward or inward nature with a free hand, and stand back and
look at it as a whole and feel like an archangel; but nowadays you have a
Society, and they come together and make a great mosaic, each man
bringing his little bit and sticking it in its place, but so taken up
with his petty fragment that he never thinks of looking at the picture
the little bits make when they are put together. You can't get any talk
out of these specialists away from their own subjects, any more than you
can get help from a policeman outside of his own beat.

--Yes,--said I,--but why should n't we always set a man talking about the
thing he knows best?

--No doubt, no doubt, if you meet him once; but what are you going to do
with him if you meet him every day? I travel with a man and we want to
make change very often in paying bills. But every time I ask him to
change a pistareen, or give me two fo'pencehappennies for a ninepence, or
help me to make out two and thrippence (mark the old Master's archaisms
about the currency), what does the fellow do but put his hand in his
pocket and pull out an old Roman coin; I have no change, says he, but
this assarion of Diocletian. Mighty deal of good that'll do me!