the time is coming when everybody will know something about every thing.
How can one have the illustrated magazines, the "Popular Science
Monthly," the Psychological journals, the theological periodicals, books
on all subjects, forced on his attention, in their own persons, so to
speak, or in the reviews which analyze and pass judgment upon them,
without getting some ideas which belong to many provinces of human
intelligence? The air we breathe is made up of four elements, at least:
oxygen, nitrogen, carbonic acid gas, and knowledge. There is something
quite delightful to witness in the absorption and devotion of a genuine
specialist. There is a certain sublimity in that picture of the dying
scholar in Browning's "A Grammarian's Funeral:"--

"So with the throttling hands of death at strife,
Ground he at grammar;
Still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife;
While he could stammer
He settled Hoti's business--let it be--
Properly based Oun
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down."

A genuine enthusiasm, which will never be satisfied until it has pumped
the well dry at the bottom of which truth is lying, always excites our
interest, if not our admiration.

One of the pleasantest of our American writers, whom we all remember as
Ik Marvel, and greet in his more recent appearance as Donald Grant
Mitchell, speaks of the awkwardness which he feels in offering to the
public a "panoramic view of British writers in these days of
specialists,--when students devote half a lifetime to the analysis of the