Sealing-wax contains no wax.
Shrew-mouse is no mouse.
Rice-paper is not made of rice or the rice plant.
Catgut should be sheepgut.
Blind worms have eyes and can see.
Cleopatra’s needles should be named after Thothmes III.
And so, I say it most confidently, the first intellectual task of our age is rightly to order and make serviceable the vast realm of printed material which four centuries have swept across our path. To organize our knowledge, to systematize our reading, to save, out of the relentless cataract of ink, the immortal thoughts of the greatest—this is a necessity unless the productive ingenuity of man is to lead us at last to a measureless and pathless chaos. To know anything that turns up is in the infinity of knowledge to know nothing. To read the first book we come across in the wilderness of books is to learn nothing. To turn over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically indifferent to all that is good.—Frederic Harrison. (1831– .) Essay on the “Choice of Books.” 1886.
Cooks’ Caps and Coronets.
True Stories of Members of the European Nobility Who Were Domestic Servants Before or After Fortune Smiled Upon Them—Several Society Leaders Came from the Kitchen.