If then, dear, intended Offspring, you will be so anachronistic as to sit beside your proposed ancestor, and so civil as to lend him your ear, he will give you one or two reasons for addressing you, rather than the general public of his own day. 4. First, then, humanity. This poor public of his (that is my) day has been, these many years, so pelted with books, that I cannot bring myself to join the mob of authors, and let fly another. The very leaves in Vallambrosa, flying before the blasts of autumn, cannot compare with them in numbers, as they go whizzing from innumerable presses. Why, I read, the other day, a statement (by a stater) that if you were to set up, in rows, all the books that are annually published in Christendom (beg pardon, my boy, evolutiondom), and then fell to sawing out shelves for them in the pine forests of North Carolina, the North Carolinians would, when they awoke, find themselves inhabitants of a prairie, provided, of course, our stater goes on to state, the job were completed in one night. Or, to put it in another shape: The earth, adds Mr. Statisticker, the earth, we will allow, for illustration’s sake, to be twenty-five thousand miles around. Now, says he, suppose all these books to be pulled to pieces [shame!] and their leaves pinned together, end to end, they would stretch ever so (for I cannot, at the moment, lay my hands on his little statistic) they would stretch ever so far. Shall I add to the already unbearable burdens of my generation? Humanity forbid! 5. And look at this: In any given country a certain number of undergarments will be worn out, year by year, producing a certain crop of rags. These rags can be converted into so much, and no more, paper. Hence, as any thinking man would have reasoned (until the advent of a recent invention), the advancing flood of literature was practically held in check. So many exhausted shirts, so many books,—so many exhausted washerwomen, so many (and no more) authors. There was a limit. That day is gone. Wood-pulp and cheap editions have opened the flood-gates of genius upon the world; and the days of our noble forests are numbered; for one tree is sawn into shelves to hold another ground into paper. And already, through the denudation of the land, the Mississippi grows uncontrollable, taxing even the wisdom of Congress. And many a lesser stream, in which once the salmon sported, or which turned a mill, or meandered, at least, past orchard or corn land, a steady source of fruitful moisture, is now a fierce torrent in spring, in autumn a string of stagnant pools. What the builder began, the builder (for that, I hear, is the Greek for him) and the novelist will end. Shall I too print a book? Patriotism forbid! 6.