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 mystic doctrines dealt
with by many of