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
.
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