just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk.  Such, however, is the case with many men of learning:  they have read themselves stupid.  For to read in every spare moment, and to read constantly, is more paralysing to the mind than constant manual work, which, at any rate, allows one to follow one’s own thoughts.  Just as a spring, through the continual pressure of a foreign body, at last loses its elasticity, so does the mind if it has another person’s thoughts continually forced upon it.  And just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment.  For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over.  Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read if one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.  Indeed, it is the same with mental as with bodily food:  scarcely the fifth part of what a man takes is assimilated; the remainder passes off in evaporation, respiration, and the like.

From all this it may be concluded that thoughts put down on paper are nothing more than footprints in the sand:  one sees the road the man has taken, but in order to know what he saw on the way, one requires his eyes.

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No literary quality can be attained by reading writers who possess it:  be it, for example, persuasiveness, imagination, the gift of drawing comparisons, boldness or bitterness, brevity or grace, facility of expression or wit, unexpected contrasts, a laconic manner, naivete, and the like.  But if we are already gifted with these qualities—­that is to say, if we possess them potentia—­we can call them forth and bring them to consciousness; we can discern to what uses they are to be put; we can be strengthened in our inclination, nay, may have courage, to use them; we can judge by examples the effect of their application and so learn the correct use of them; and it is only after we have accomplished all this that we actu possess these qualities.  This is the only way in which reading can form writing, since it teaches us the use to which we can put our own natural gifts; and in order to do this it must be taken for granted that these qualities are in us.  Without them we learn nothing from reading but cold, dead mannerisms, and we become mere imitators.

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The health officer should, in the interest of one’s eyes, see that the smallness of print has a fixed minimum, which must not be exceeded.  When I was in Venice in 1818, at which time the genuine Venetian chain was still being made, a goldsmith told me that those who made the catena fina turned blind at thirty.

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