And next to the author or the book that you have discovered yourself comes the one that the discoverer himself—­your boy or girl friend—­tells you about. He knows a good thing—­she knows it!  No school nonsense about that; no adult misunderstanding.  I found out Poe that way, and Thackeray’s “Major Gahagan”, and many others.

To go back to our old illustration and consider for a moment not the book but the mind, the personality whose ideas it records, such association with books represents association with one’s fellowmen in society—­at a reception, in school or college, at a club.  Some we pass by with a nod, with some we exchange a word; sometimes there is a warm handgrasp; sometimes a long conversation.  No matter what the mental contact may be, it has its effects—­we are continually gaining knowledge, making new friends, receiving fresh inspiration.  The complexion of this kind of daily association determines the cast of one’s mind, the thoroughness of his taste, the usefulness or uselessness of what he does.  A man is known by the company he keeps, because that company forms him; he gets from it what becomes brain of his brain and soul of his soul.

And no less is he formed by his mental associations with the good and the great of all ages whom he meets in books and who talk to him there.  More rather than less; for into a book the writer puts generally what is best in him, laying aside the pettiness, the triviality, the downright wickedness that may have characterized him in the flesh.

I have often heard the comment from one who had met face to face a writer whose work he loved—­“Oh! he disappointed me so!” How disappointed might we be with Thackeray, with Dickens, even with Shakespeare, could we meet them in the flesh!  Now they can not disappoint us, for we know only what they have left on record—­the best, the most enduring part, purified from what is gross and earthly.

In and among such company as this it is your privilege to live and move, almost without money and without price.  Thank God for books; let them be your friends and companions through life—­for information, for recreation, but above all for inspiration.

ATOMIC THEORIES OF ENERGY[6]

    [6] Read before the St. Louis Academy of Science.

A theory involving some sort of a discrete or discontinuous structure of energy has been put forward by Prof.  Max Planck of the University of Berlin.  The various aspects of this theory are discussed and elaborated by the late M. Henri Poincare in a paper entitled “L’Hypothese des Quanta,” published in the Revue Scientifique (Paris, Feb. 21, 1912).