“But words are things, and a small drop of ink Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.” I shall conclude this part of my subject with a quotation from Sir William Hamilton: “The primary principle of education is the determination of the pupil to self‐activity—the doing nothing for him which he is able to do for himself.” This principle is applicable to every stage of the mind’s development, and in it will be found the secret of success in the great work of self‐education. The student, I have said, should cultivate a fondness for intelligent and thoughtful reading; for in books chiefly all human knowledge is treasured up. “Many a man lives a burden to the earth,” says Milton; “but a good book is the precious life‐blood of a master‐spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” But only a few books are good. The great mass of those that are written fall upon the world dead, or at best survive but a short time. We are about to celebrate the centennial anniversary of our national existence, and, in the hundred years of our life, we have made many books. How many of them will be read in the next century? A dozen? Hardly. There is the Augustan age, the age of Leo X., the Elizabethan age, the age of Louis XIV., the age of Queen Anne, all remarkable for literary excellence and the number of great writers whom they produced, and yet you can count on your fingers the really good books that each has bequeathed to us. And this, too, is worthy of remark: a considerable portion of the books that survive are saved by style alone, and not on account of more solid worth. Books which have the inductive sciences as their object can, from the nature of things, live but a short time, since these sciences, being in a state of continuous development are constantly outgrowing their own conclusions, and the treatises of even the ablest observers are superseded by those of men who, with less genius, have more certain and numerous data. Works of imagination, poetry and romance, may meet with temporary success, without possessing the higher qualities, from the fact that they describe a mental, moral, or social phase of existence whose chief interest lies in its actuality. When this is past, the literary efforts called forth by it die. In fiction, only the very best is worthy of study. “Mediocribus esse poetis Non homines, non dî, non concessere columnæ.” And here is a case in point, in which we should know how to rise above prejudice—the vulgar prejudice of the insipid and intellectually indolent society of our day, in which it is considered the proper thing for a man of culture to read each worthless production that happens to have a run. Persons of intellectual aspirations should, as far as possible, associate with their superiors in knowledge and elevation of thought, and should exclude the common herd from intellectual companionship.