The work is popular in its form, but it is inwoven throughout with a thread of lurking meanings so near the surface, and at times so boldly obtruded, that it is difficult to understand how it could ever have been read at all without occasioning the inquiry which it was intended to occasion under certain conditions, but which it was necessary for this society to ward off from their works, except under these limitations, at the time when they were issued. For these inner meanings are everywhere pointed and emphasized with the most bold and vivid illustration, which lies on the surface of the work, in the form of stories, often without any apparent relevance in that exterior connection--brought in, as it would seem, in mere caprice or by the loosest threads of association. They lie, with the 'allegations' which accompany them, strewn all over the surface of the work, like 'trap' on 'sand-stone,' telling their story to the scientific eye, and beckoning the philosophic explorer to that primeval granite of sciences that their vein will surely lead to. But the careless observer, bent on recreation, observes only a pleasing feature in the landscape, one that breaks happily its threatened dulness; the reader, reading this book as _books_ are wont to be read, finds nothing in this phenomenon to excite his curiosity. And the author knows him and his ways so well, that he is able to foresee that result, and is not afraid to trust to it in the case of those whose scrutiny he is careful to avoid. For he is one who counts largely on the carelessness, or the indifference, or the stupidity of those whom he addresses. There is no end to his confidence in that. He is perpetually staking his life on it. Neither is he willing to trust to the clues which these unexplained stories might seem of themselves to offer to the studious eye, to engage the attention of the reader--the reader whose attention he is bent on securing. Availing himself of one of those nooks of discourse, which he is at no loss for the means of creating when the purpose of his _essaie_ requires it, he beckons the confidential reader aside, and thus explains his method to him, outright, in terms which admit of but one construction. 'Neither these stories,' he says, 'nor my allegations do always serve simply for example, authority, or ornament; I do not only regard them for the use I make of them; they carry sometimes, _besides what I apply them to_, the seeds of a richer and bolder matter, and sometimes, _collaterally, a more delicate sound_, both to me myself,--who will say no more about it _in this place_' [we shall hear more of it in another place, however, and where the delicate collateral sounds will not be wanting]--'both to me myself, and _to others who happen to be of my ear_.'