_Second_, Another suggestion that we may make in regard to the use of books is that _we should read from some centre or standpoint_. A person takes a house in the country. This he makes the centre of many excursions. One day he climbs the mountain, another day he walks by winding stream, on another he sails along the shore. In this way he explores the surrounding country by degrees, coming back each night to the place he started from. We may do much the same thing with profit in our excursions among books. For instance, we may take the starting-point of our _profession_, and read all we can in regard to it. A farmer should read about farming, a lawyer about law, a divine about theology. Or we may take the starting-point of our _physical frame_, and read steadily all we can as to our bodily organisation and its laws; or we may take as our starting point the _land_ we dwell in, or even the locality where we live, and seek to learn all we can regarding its history. In this way distinct lines of study are opened up to us, and we are saved the evil of desultory reading, which too often fills the mind only with a jumble of facts undigested and unarranged, and therefore of but little value. The writer knew a young minister in a Scottish manse who had among the few books in his library the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. In this work he took up distinct courses of reading--a course of biography, a course of history, a course of geography--and in this way he acquired knowledge well systematized, which was of great value to him in his after life. We should endeavor, according to some such method as we have indicated, to carry on our reading. "Every man and every woman who can read at all should adopt some definite purpose in their reading, should take something for the main stem and trunk of their culture, whence branches might grow out in all directions, seeking air and light for the parent tree, which it is hoped might end in becoming something useful and ornamental, and which at any rate all along will have had life and growth in it." These words of Sir Arthur Helps put very tersely the point on which we have been insisting.