an idea
started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its
originator was spoken of as a crank. Do you want to know why that name
is given to the men who do most for the world's progress? I will tell
you. It is because cranks make all the wheels in all the machinery of
the world go round. What would a steam-engine be without a crank? I
suppose the first fool that looked on the first crank that was ever made
asked what that crooked, queer-looking thing was good for. When the
wheels got moving he found out. Tell us something about that book which
has so much to say concerning cranks."

Hereupon I requested Delilah to carry back Morhof, and replace him in the
wide gap he had left in the bookshelf. She was then to find and bring
down the volume I had been speaking of.

Delilah took the wisdom of the seventeenth century in her arms, and
departed on her errand. The book she brought down was given me some
years ago by a gentleman who had sagaciously foreseen that it was just
one of those works which I might hesitate about buying, but should be
well pleased to own. He guessed well; the book has been a great source
of instruction and entertainment to me. I wonder that so much time and
cost should have been expended upon a work which might have borne a title
like the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus; and yet it is such a wonderful
museum of the productions of the squinting brains belonging to the class
of persons commonly known as cranks that we could hardly spare one of its
five hundred octavo pages.

Those of us who are in the habit of receiving letters from all sorts of
would-be-literary people--letters of inquiry, many of them with reference
to matters we are supposed to understand--can readily see how it was that
Mr. De Morgan, never too busy to be good-natured with the people who
pestered--or amused-him with their queer fancies, received such a number
of letters from persons who thought they had made great discoveries, from
those who felt that they and their inventions and contrivances had been
overlooked, and who sought in his large charity of disposition and great
receptiveness a balm for their wounded feelings and a ray of hope for
their darkened prospects.

The book before us is made up from papers published in "The Athenaeum,"
with additions by the author. Soon after opening it we come to names
with which we are familiar, the first of these, that of Cornelius
Agrippa, being connected with the occult and m