over, and that the pleasure
derived from such re-reading is a sign that a book is peculiarly adapted
in some way to the reader. Finally, that one's private library, especially
if its size be limited, may well consist of personal favorites, often
re-read.

When the astronomer Kepler had reduced to simple laws the complicated
motions of the planets he cried out in ecstacy: "O God! now think I Thy
thoughts after Thee!" Thus when a great writer of old time has been
vouchsafed a spark of the divine fire we may think his divine thoughts
after him by re-reading. And Shakespeare tells us in that deathless speech
of Portia's, that since mercy is God's attribute we may by exercising it
become like God. Thus, by the mere act of tuning our brains to think the
thoughts that the Almighty has put into the minds of the good and the
great, may it not be that our own thoughts may at the last come to be
shaped in the same mould?

"Old wine, old friends, old books," says the old adage; and of the three
the last are surely the most satisfying. The old wine may turn to vinegar;
old friends may forget or forsake us; but the old book is ever the same.
What would the old man do without it? And to you who are young I would
say--you may re-read, you first must read. Choose worthy books to love. As
for those who know no book long enough either to love or despise it--who
skim through good and bad alike and forget page ninety-nine while reading
page 100, we may simply say to them, in the words of the witty Frenchman,
"What a sad old age you are preparing for yourself!"

HISTORY AND HEREDITY[8]

[8] Read before the New England Society of St. Louis.

In one of his earlier books, Prof. Hugo Munsterberg cites the growing love
for tracing pedigrees as evidence of a dangerous American tendency toward
aristocracy. There are only two little things the matter with this--the
fact and the inference from it. In the first place, we Americans have
always been proud of our ancestry and fond of tracing it; and in the
second place, this fondness is akin, not to aristocracy but to democracy.
It is not the purpose of this paper to prove this thesis in detail, so I
will merely bid you note that aristocratic pedigree-tracers confine
themselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of
the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First
Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his
great-gr