England (if not Great Britain) when she gets
(say) seventy millions that are allotted to her
against six or eight hundred millions for the
United States. We have heard in some
systems of the pressure of population upon food;
but the idea of any pressure from any
quarter upon space is hardly yet familiar. Still, I
suppose that many a reader must have been
struck with the naive simplicity of the hyperbole
of St. John, [2] perhaps a solitary unit of its
kind in the New Testament: "the which if
they should be written every one, I suppose
that even the world itself could not contain
the books that should be written."

A book, even Audubon (I believe the biggest
known), is smaller than a man; but, in relation
to space, I entertain more proximate
apprehension of pressure upon available space from
the book population than from the numbers of
mankind. We ought to recollect, with more
of a realized conception than we commonly
attain to, that a book consists, like a man,
from whom it draws its lineage, of a body and
a soul. They are not always proportionate to
each other. Nay, even the different members
of the book-body do not sing, but clash, when
bindings of a profuse costliness are imposed,
as too often happens in the case of Bibles and
books of devotion, upon letter-press which is