Brother _Didius_, _Tribonius_ will answer—(now _Tribonius_ the civilian and church lawyer’s beard being three inches and a half and three eighths longer than _Didius_ his beard—I’m glad he takes up the cudgels for me, so I give myself no farther trouble about the answer.)—Brother _Didius, Tribonius_ will say, it is a decreed case, as you may find it in the fragments of _Gregorius_ and _Hermogines_’s codes, and in all the codes from _Justinian_’s down to the codes of _Louis_ and _Des Eaux_—That the sweat of a man’s brows, and the exsudations of a man’s brains, are as much a man’s own property as the breeches upon his backside;—which said exsudations, &c. being dropp’d upon the said apple by the labour of finding it, and picking it up; and being moreover indissolubly wasted, and as indissolubly annex’d, by the picker up, to the thing pick’d up, carried home, roasted, peel’d, eaten, digested, and so on;——’tis evident that the gatherer of the apple, in so doing, has mix’d up something which was his own, with the apple which was not his own, by which means he has acquired a property;—or, in other words, the apple is _John_’s apple. By the same learned chain of reasoning my father stood up for all his opinions; he had spared no pains in picking them up, and the more they lay out of the common way, the better still was his title.——No mortal claimed them; they had cost him moreover as much labour in cooking and digesting as in the case above, so that they might well and truly be said to be of his own goods and chattels.—Accordingly he held fast by ’em, both by teeth and claws—would fly to whatever he could lay his hands on—and, in a word, would intrench and fortify them round with as many circumvallations and breast-works, as my uncle _Toby_ would a citadel. There was one plaguy rub in the way of this——the scarcity of materials to make any thing of a defence with, in case of a smart attack; inasmuch as few men of great genius had exercised their parts in writing books upon the subject of great noses: by the trotting of my lean horse, the thing is incredible! and I am quite lost in my understanding, when I am considering what a treasure of precious time and talents together has been wasted upon worse subjects—and how many millions of books in all languages and in all possible types and bindings, have been fabricated upon points not half so much tending to the unity and peace-making of the world. What was to be had, however, he set the greater store by; and though my father would oft-times sport with my uncle _Toby_’s library—which, by-the-bye, was ridiculous enough—yet at the very same time he did it, he collected every book and treatise which had been systematically wrote upon noses, with as much care as my honest uncle _Toby_ had done those upon military architecture.——’Tis true, a much less table would have held them—but that was not thy transgression, my dear uncle.——