We are too apt to use books, as well as society, merely for our amusement; to read the books that chance to fall into our hands, or to associate with the persons we happen to meet with, and not stop to ask ourselves if nothing better is within our reach. It may not be in our power to associate with great living minds, but the mental wealth of the past is within the reach of all. We boast much that we are a reading people, but it may be well to inquire how intelligently we read. The catalogues of books borrowed from our public libraries show, that, where the readers of works of amusement are counted by hundreds, the readers of instructive books are numbered by units. In conversation, it is not uncommon to hear persons expressing indifference or dislike to whole classes of books,--to hear Travels denounced as stupid, Biography as tame, and History as heavy and dull. It does not seem to occur to the mass of minds that any purpose beyond the amusement of the moment is to be thought of in reading, or that any plan should be laid, or any principles adopted, in the choice of books to be read. It is undoubtedly a great good that nearly all our people are taught to read, but it is a small fraction of the community that reads to much good purpose. Children, so soon as they have acquired the use of the alphabet, are inundated with little juvenile stories, some of them good, but most of them silly, and many vulgar. As they grow older, successions of similar works of fiction await them, until they arrive at adolescence, when they are fully prepared for all the wealth of folly, vulgarity, falsehood, and wickedness that is bound up within the yellow covers of most of the cheap novels that infest every highway of the nation.