Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light.  Niepce, a Frenchman, discovered “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect,—­that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal, “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe.”  But he observed that “those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them.”  Hence it has been inferred that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.”  Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated:  part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented.  The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge,—­Gramatica parda, tawny grammar,—­a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.  It is said that knowledge is power; and the like.  Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense:  for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?  What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.  By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers—­for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?—­a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse, and leaves all his harness behind in the stable.  I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,——­Go to grass.  You have eaten hay long enough.  The spring has come with its green crop.  The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round.  So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.