 and geometry constituted that culture of the mind which prepared it for
the reception of any subsequent crop. I say nothing against Mr. Stelling's
theory: if we are to have one regimen for all minds, his seems to me as good as
any other. I only know it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as if he
had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which prevented
him from digesting it. It is astonishing what a different result one gets by
changing the metaphor! Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and one's
ingenious conception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and harrows seems
to settle nothing. But then it is open to some one else to follow great
authorities, and call the mind a sheet of white paper or a mirror, in which case
one's knowledge of the digestive process becomes quite irrelevant. It was
doubtless an ingenious idea to call the camel the ship of the desert, but it
would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast. O Aristotle! if you had
had the advantage of being »the freshest modern« instead of the greatest
ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a
sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows
itself in speech without metaphor, - that we can so seldom declare what a thing
is, except by saying it is something else?
    Tom Tulliver, being abundant in no form of speech, did not use any metaphor
to declare his views as to the nature of Latin: he never called it an instrument
of torture; and it was not until he had got on some way in the next half-year,
and in the Delectus, that he was advanced enough to call it a »bore« and
»beastly stuff.« At present, in relation to this demand that he should learn
Latin declensions and conjugations, Tom was in a state of as blank
unimaginativeness concerning the cause and tendency of his sufferings, as if he
had been an innocent shrew-mouse imprisoned in the split trunk of an ash-tree in
order to cure lameness in cattle. It is doubtless almost incredible to
instructed minds of the present day that a boy of twelve, not belonging strictly
to »the masses,« who are now understood to have the monopoly of mental darkness,
should have had no distinct idea how there came to be such a thing as Latin on
this earth: yet so it was with Tom. It would have taken a long while to make
conceivable to him that there ever existed a people who bought and sold sheep
