There was nothing better than these things and there was not a little that was much worse.  A young fellow of two or three and twenty has as good a right to spoil a magazine-full of essays in learning how to write, as an oculist like Wenzel had to spoil his hat-full of eyes in learning how to operate for cataract, or an elegant like Brummel to point to an armful of failures in the attempt to achieve a perfect tie.  This son of mine, whom I have not seen for these twenty-five years, generously counted, was a self-willed youth, always too ready to utter his unchastised fancies.  He, like too many American young people, got the spur when he should have had the rein.  He therefore helped to fill the market with that unripe fruit which his father says in one of these papers abounds in the marts of his native country.  All these by-gone shortcomings he would hope are forgiven, did he not feel sure that very few of his readers know anything about them.  In taking the old name for the new papers, he felt bound to say that he had uttered unwise things under that title, and if it shall appear that his unwisdom has not diminished by at least half while his years have doubled, he promises not to repeat the experiment if he should live to double them again and become his own grandfather.

Oliver Wendell Holmes. 
Boston.  Nov. 1st 1858.

CHAPTER I

I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical and algebraical intellects.  All economical and practical wisdom is an extension or variation of the following arithmetical formula:  2+2=4.  Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the expression a+b=c.  We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters instead of figures.

They all stared.  There is a divinity student lately come among us to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or pertinent questions are involved.  He abused his liberty on this occasion by presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same observation.—­No, sir, I replied, he has not.  But he said a mighty good thing about mathematics, that sounds something like it, and you found it, not in the original, but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid.  I will tell the company what he did say, one of these days.

—­If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration?—­I blush to say that I do not at this present moment.  I once did, however.  It was the first association to which I ever heard the term applied; a body of scientific young men in a great foreign city who admired their teacher, and to some extent each other.  Many of them deserved it; they have become famous since.  It amuses me to hear the talk of one of those beings described by Thackeray—­