One of the laborious ants of whom we have been speaking asks, “For what do we read?” and complacently answers, “To know _facts_.”[28] Indeed! The highest office of mind is to make itself a barren storehouse! To us it appears, on the contrary, that we should read and study generally, not to _know_ facts, but to _be wise_ from facts, to make the head wiser and the heart better. The mind is not to be considered as a mere granary and barren receptacle of literary food, but rather as the stomach which converts into a new substance—assimilating good healthy flesh and blood—the heterogeneous materials which are put into it. Another ant, of no mean pretensions among his brethren, enthusiastically endeavours, by promises of “literary glory,” to incite some of them to pile up into one heap the confused materials they have collected. “Let us see,” he says with childish glee, “how much we’ve got! You John, and you Willy, and you Bobby bring what you’ve collected! There pile it up! Make a snow man; cut him eyes, and nose, and mouth.” There he is with a pipe in his white lips. Doesn’t he look sage, and grave, and solemn? Dance round him, ye children; clap your hands and be merry. Rejoice over your work while it lasts. The first warm breath of spring will melt it away. It is no man, it has no life, it is cold and dead. The snow, give it what shape you will, is snow still. You have collected much, but you have got nothing new out of your collection. But lest it should be supposed that we belie this celebrated ant—this collector of grain—we will quote his own words: “Within the last two hundred years (says Professor Playfair), or since Galileo and Bacon taught us this great lesson, _we have been employed in recording facts_ in ten thousand several volumes. But thus scattered, they lose so much of their value and importance, that, in another age, we may hope some aspirant after literary glory will perform the Herculean labour of condensing the whole into (What?—a system of the universe? a better knowledge of nature? No!) _a volume!_” A _volume!_ that is to say, gather the scattered masses into one heap as heterogeneous as the scattered masses; pile up the snow, strewed over pathway and field, hedge and ditch, into a snow man. That is the highest aspiration of this Professor of divers learned societies. His grovelling soul soars not to the hope that any new fact may be extracted by mind from this vast heap of raw materials. He knows not that, metaphysically, two and two make five, and that without any other material additions, without any more ant-collections, the heap may be made to grow and swell, that the spirit of life may be breathed into it, and that, wedded to mind, it may even become the prolific parent of new facts of a far higher and more enduring nature than any in his boasted volume. Facts, which, having mind for one of their parents, will with filial love pay back in tenfold blessings the life given them; facts which will lead