will actually hold books in deep reverence. Books! Bottled
chatter! things that some other simian has formerly said. They
will dress them in costly bindings, keep them under glass, and
take an affecting pride in the number they read. Libraries
--store-houses of books,--will dot their world. The destruction
of one will be a crime against civilization. (Meaning, again, a
simian civilization.) Well, it is an offense to be sure--a barbaric
offense. But so is defacing forever a beautiful landscape; and they
won't even notice that sometimes; they won't shudder anyway, the way
they instinctively do at the loss of a "library."


All this is inevitable and natural, and they cannot help it. There
even are ways one can justify excesses like this. If their hunger
for books ever seems indiscriminate to them when they themselves
stop to examine it, they will have their excuses. They will argue
that some bits of knowledge they once had thought futile, had later
on come in most handy, in unthought of ways. True enough! For their
scientists. But not for their average men: they will simply be like
obstinate housekeepers who clog up their homes, preserving odd boxes
and wrappings, and stray lengths of string, to exult if but one is
of some trifling use ere they die. It will be in this spirit that
simians will cherish their books, and pile them up everywhere into
great indiscriminate mounds; and these mounds will seem signs of
culture and sagacity to them.

Those who know many facts will feel wise! They will despise those
who don't. They will even believe, many of them, that knowledge
is power. Unfortunate dupes of this saying will keep on reading,
ambitiously, till they have stunned their native initiative, and