JULY REVIEWED BY SEPTEMBER.

The Editors of the “Atlantic,” of course, have universal knowledge (with few exceptions) at their fingers’ ends,—­that is, they possess an Encyclopaedia, gapped here and there by friends fond of portable information and familiar with that hydrostatic paradox in which the motion of solids up a spout is balanced by a very slender column of the liquidating medium.  The once goodly row of quartos looks now like a set of mineral teeth that have essayed too closely to simulate Nature by assaulting a Boston cracker; and the intervals of vacuity among the books, as among the incisors, deprive the owner of his accustomed glibness in pronouncing himself on certain topics.  Among the missing volumes is one of those in M, and accordingly our miss-information [A] on all subjects from Mabinogion to Mustard is not to be entirely relied upon.  Under these painful circumstances, and with the chance of still further abstractions from our common stock of potential learning, we have engaged a staff of consulting engineers, who contract, for certain considerations, to know every useless thing from A to Z, and every obsolete one from Omega to Alpha.  In these gentlemen we repose unlimited confidence in proportion to their salaries; for a considerable experience of mankind has taught us that omniscience is a much commoner and easier thing than science, especially in this favored country and under democratic institutions, which give to every man the inestimable right of knowing as much as he pleases.  Everything was going on well when our Man of Science unaccountably disappeared, and our Aesthetic Editor experienced in all its terrors the Scriptural doom of being left to himself.  This latter gentleman is tolerably shady in scientific matters, nay, to say sooth, light-proof, or only so far penetrable as to make darkness visible.  Between science and nescience the difference seems to his mind little, if n e, and he would accept as perfectly satisfactory a statement that “the ponderability of air in a vitreous table-tipping medium (the abnormal variation being assumed as $ x-b .0000001) is exactly proportioned to the squares of the circumambient distances, provided the perihelia are equal, and the evolution of nituretted carbogen in the boomerang be carefully avoided during evaporation; the power of the parallax being represented, of course, according to the well-known theorem of Rabelais, by H.U.M.  Hemsterhuysius seems to have been familiar with this pretty experiment.”  The above sentence being shown to the Aesthetic Editor aforesaid, he acknowledges that he sees nothing more absurd than common in it, and that the theory seems to him as worthy of trial as Hedgecock’s quadrant, which he took with him once on a journey to New York, arriving safely with a single observation of the height of the steamer’s funnel.

[Footnote A:  MISS-INFORMATION.  A higgledy-piggledy want of intelligence acquired by young misses at boarding-schools.—­Supplement to Johnson’s Dictionary.]