Thus there is a writing upon the wall of cliffs at Cromer, and whoso runs may read it. It tells us with an authority which can not be impeached, that the ancient sea-bed of the chalk sea was raised up and remained dry land until it was covered with forest, stocked with the great game the spoils of which have rejoiced your geologists. How long it remained in that condition can not be said; but "the whirligig of time brought its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of drift and boulder clay. Sea beasts such as the walrus, now restricted to the extreme north, paddled about where birds had twittered among the topmost twigs of the fir-trees. How long this state of things endured we know not, but at length it came to an end. The upheaved glacial mud hardened into the soil of modern Norfolk. Forests grew once more, the wolf and the beaver replaced the reindeer and the elephant; and at length what we call the history of England dawned. FREDERIC HARRISON Born in 1831; educated at Oxford; one of the founders of the Positivist School; Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at Lincoln's Inn Hall, 1877-89; alderman of London in 1889-92; published "The Meaning of History" in 1862; "The Choice of Books" in 1886; "Oliver Cromwell" in 1889; "Victorian Literature" in 1895; a Life of Ruskin in 1902; a book on Washington in 1902. THE GREAT BOOKS OF THE WORLD[61] I say it most confidently, the first intellectual task of our age is rightly to order and make serviceable the vast realm of printed material which four centuries have swept across our path. To organize our knowledge, to systematize our reading, to save, out of the relentless cataract of ink, the immortal thoughts of the greatest--this is a necessity unless the productive ingenuity of man is to lead us at last to a measureless and pathless chaos. To know anything that turns up is, in the infinity of knowledge, to know nothing. To read the first book we come across, in the wilderness of books, is to learn nothing. To turn over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically indifferent to all that is good.... [Footnote 61: From an address on "The Choice of Books," read before the London Institution in the winter of 1878-79, and afterward made the basis of Mr. Harrison's book having the same title.]