different general or special subjects: geology, plant life, Palestine,

chemistry, Eskimos, mythology, literature, The Nile, history, law, wit,

evolution, religion, biography, and electricity. Surely, it needs no sage to

discover that the secret of this man's reserve power is the old secret of our

artesian well whose abundance surges from unseen depths.

 

_THE USES OF BOOKS AND READING[9]_

 

Each Kingsley approaches a stone as a jeweler approaches a casket to unlock the

hidden gems. Geikie causes the bit of hard coal to unroll the juicy bud, the

thick odorous leaves, the pungent boughs, until the bit of carbon enlarges into

the beauty of a tropic forest. That little book of Grant Allen's called "How

Plants Grow" exhibits trees and shrubs as eating, drinking and marrying. We see

certain date groves in Palestine, and other date groves in the desert a hundred

miles away, and the pollen of the one carried upon the trade winds to the

branches of the other. We see the tree with its strange system of water-works,

pumping the sap up through pipes and mains; we see the chemical laboratory in

the branches mixing flavor for the orange in one bough, mixing the juices of the

pineapple in another; we behold the tree as a mother making each infant acorn

ready against the long winter, rolling it in swaths soft and warm as wool

blankets, wrapping it around with garments impervious to the rain, and finally

slipping the infant acorn into a sleeping bag, like those the Eskimos gave Dr.

Kane.

 

At length we come to feel that the Greeks were not far wrong in thinking each