e publisher with his "Great American Novel,"
the city auctioneer with his "Pictures by the Old Masters"--all and
every one protest each his own innocence, and warn you against the
deceits of the rest. My inexperienced friend, take it for granted that
they all tell the truth--about each other! and then transact your
business to the best of your ability on your own judgment. Never fear
but that you will get experience enough, and that you will pay well for
it too; and towards the time when you shall no longer need earthly
goods, you will begin to know how to buy.

Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of
humanity. Yet books are thickly peppered with humbug. "Travellers'
stories" have been the scoff of ages, from the "True Story" of witty old
Lucian the Syrian down to the gorillarities--if I may coin a word--of
the Frenchman Du Chaillu. Ireland's counterfeited Shakspeare plays,
Chatterton's forged manuscripts, George Psalmanazar's forged Formosan
language, Jo Smith's Mormon Bible, (it should be noted that this and the
Koran sounded two strings of humbug together--the literary and the
religious,) the more recent counterfeits of the notorious Greek
Simonides--such literary humbugs as these are equal in presumption and
in ingenuity too, to any of a merely business kind, though usually
destitute of that sort of impiety which makes the great religious
humbugs horrible as well as impudent.

Science is another important field of human effort. Science is the
pursuit of pure truth, and the systematizing of it. In such an
employment as that, one might reasonably hope to find all things done in
honesty and sincerity. Not at all, my ardent and inquiring friends,
there is a scientific humbug just as large as any other. We have all
heard of the Moon Hoax. Do none of you remember the Hydrarchos
Sillimannii, that awful Alabama snake? It was only a little while ago
that a grave account appeared in a newspaper of a whole new business of
compressing ice. Perpetual motion has been the dream of scientific
visionaries, and a pretended but cheating realization of it has been
exhibited by scamp after scamp. I understand that one is at this moment
being invented over in Jersey City. I have purchased more than one
"perpetual motion" myself. Many persons will remember Mr. Paine--"The
Great Shot-at" as he was called, from his story that people were
constantly trying to kill him--and his water-gas. There have been othe