their sons and make of these living temples mere receptacles of Roman, Grecian, or Egyptian relics.  We don’t believe that “mummy is medicinal,” the Arabian doctor Haly to the contrary notwithstanding.  If it ever was, its day has gone by.  Therefore let all sensible people pray for a Cromwell,—­not to pull down University Science, but to set up the Commonwealth of Common Sense, to subordinate the former to the latter, and to proclaim an education for our own age and for its exigencies.  Your dry-goods jobber stands in violent contrast to your University man in the matter of practical adaptation.  His knowledge is no affair of dried specimens, but every particle of it a living knowledge, ready, at a moment’s warning, for all or any of the demands of life.

You are perhaps thinking,—­“Yes, that is supposable, because the lessons learned by the jobber are limited to the common affairs of daily life, are not prospective; because, belonging only to the passing day, they are easily surveyed on all sides, and their full use realized at once; in short, a mere matter of buying and selling goods:  a very inferior thing, as compared with the dignified and scholarly labors of the student.”

How mistaken this estimate is will appear, as we advance to something like a comprehensive survey of the dry-goods jobber’s sphere.

First, then, he is a buyer of all manner of goods, wares, and materials proper to his department in commerce.  He is minutely informed in the history of raw materials.  He knows the countries from which they come,—­the adaptation of soils and climates to their raising,—­the skill of the cultivators,—­the shipping usages,—­the effect of transportation by land and sea on raw materials, and on manufactured articles,—­with all the mysteries of insurance allowances and usages, the debentures on exportation, and the duties on importation, in his own and in other lands.  His forecast is taxed to the utmost, as to what may be the condition of his own market, six, twelve, or eighteen months from the time of ordering goods, both as to the quantity which may be in market, and as to the fashion, which is always changing,—­and also as to the condition of his customers to pay for goods, which will often depend upon the fertility of the season.  As respects home-purchases, he is compelled to learn, or to suffer for the want of knowing, that the difference between being a skilful, pleasant buyer and the opposite is a profit or loss of from five to seven and a half or ten per cent.,—­or, in other words, the difference, oftentimes, between success and ruin, between comfort and discomfort, between being a welcome and a hated visitor, between being honored as an able merchant and contemned as a mean man or an unmitigated bore.