as statues and "Things of Lustre," which | scrub than fish, much to their annoyance, not a few of the present day regard as toys until now the ground is pretty clear, and for children, and in so doing thrust Bacon the bottom of the sea, to a great extent, out of court as an arbiter of taste. I con- turned up with the continual raking, so fess that I should never care to adorn my that the haddocks are able to feed more on garden with topiary or with carpet bed- the smaller shellfish, which produces a ding; but I hope always to be cautious in firmer, finer fish. Not only have the trawlmaking declarations in respect of such ers improved the quality of the haddocks matters, that I may not appear to despise by removing the scrub, but much has been another man's pleasures, or vainly desire done to feed them by the throwing overto set up a standard of my own in oppo- board of enormous quantities of offal, imsition to the delightful variety that is en- mature and small fish, which the haddock, sured by the free exercise of individual who is a very good scavenger, greedily taste and fancy. Let us grant that these consumes. Haddocks are caught all over things are for children, and what then? the North Sea, but the larger catches are they are not thereby abolished. In my got on the south-east part of the Doggeropinion they have acquired special impor- bank in deep water, and being a lively fish tance, for to please children may be a a brisk wind is most favorable. proper employment at times for a philosopher; and if children's pleasures are to be excluded from gardens, then I am prepared to say that gardens are altogether objectionable. That there are men and women with childish tastes must also be admitted, and I propose that we please them as well as the real children.

From The Fishing Gazette.
THE HADDOCK.

THE haddock, as food for the million, is now beginning to take its place, and is, or shortly will be, the principal and one of the most valuable of the many blessings we have provided for the use of these overpopulated islands in the North Sea. Yet it is not long not twenty-five years ago - since haddock were thought comparatively worthless, and the then trawlers were in the habit of throwing them overboard as of no value at all except the last haul, which could be brought to the market alive. Even the haddock of ten years ago was a very different fish from the present

one.

When the trawlers began to fish on the south-east part of the Doggerbank which seemed to be the favorite place for haddock, and from which an immense quantity is brought with no apparent diminution of the supply-rather the reverse - the fish were at first of a soft, lank description, with a peculiar weedy and objectionable taste, owing to the great amount of "scrub," seaweed, etc., among which the fish dwelt, and on which they undoubtedly fed to some extent. Gradually this scrub has been cleared away by the trawler fishers, who at first got more

When the trawler goes haddocking, she makes a voyage of from ten to twenty days, and will take out with her five or six tons of block ice. At this time of the year, when she arrives on the ground she will shoot her gear in the evening at dusk, and commence to get in between four and five the next morning, an operation lasting from two to six hours according to circumstances; but when the bag is in sight, the net approaching the top of the water haddock being very buoyant - there is generally no lack of excitement, and all labor is well compensated for by a good take, and to see the pretty creatures as they lie on the deck is a sight worth being seasick for. When the net is emptied, which often has to be done by cutting a hole in it, the next operation is to clean: each hand gets a knife and opens the fish, carefully cleaning and taking out the livers, which are perquisites and much valued by the crew. After that the fish is well washed on deck, and then packed in pounds in the fishroom, a layer of ice and then a layer of fish; this process is continued until the last haul, which is generally put below without cleaning, and sold as sound fish.

The cleaned fish when landed are all sold to the curers and converted into smoked haddocks, either at the landingplace or despatched to inland smokers a practice which is becoming more common, as the fish when smoked are better when taken out of the smoke-house to the table. Packing in barrels has a tendency to deteriorate the fish, and if long packed they are liable to sweat, which spoils the flavor and who does not like a good smoked haddock?

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From The Fortnightly Review.
ON THE CHOICE OF BOOKS.*

IT is the fashion for those who have any connection with letters, in the presence of thoughtful men and women, eager for knowledge, and anxious after all that can be gotten from books, to expatiate on the infinite blessings of literature, and the miraculous achievements of the press: to extol, as a gift above price, the taste for study and the love of reading. Far be it from me to gainsay the inestimable value of good books, or to discourage any man from reading the best; but I often think that we forget that other side to this glorious view of literature: the misuse of books, the debilitating waste of life in aimless, promiscuous, vapid reading, or even, it may be, in the poisonous inhalation of mere literary garbage and bad men's worst thoughts.

evanescent parts is really to know nothing
worth knowing. It is in the end the same
thing, whether we do not use our minds
for serious study at all, or whether we ex-
haust them by an impotent voracity for
idle and desultory "information," as it is
called —
-a thing as fruitful as whistling.
Of the two plans I prefer the former. At
least, in that case, the mind is healthy and
open. It is not gorged and enfeebled by
excess in that which cannot nourish, much
less enlarge and beautify our nature.

But there is much more than this. Even to those who resolutely avoid the idleness of reading what is trivial, a difficulty is presented, a difficulty every day increasing by virtue even of our abundance of books. What are the subjects, what are the class of books we are to read, in what order, with what connection, to what ultimate use or object? Even those who are resolved to read the better books are embarrassed by a field of choice practically boundless. The longest life, the greatest industry, the most powerful memory, would not suffice to make us profit from a hundredth part of the world of books before us. If the great Newton said that he seemed to have been all his life gathering a few shells on the shore, whilst a boundless ocean of truth still lay beyond and unknown to him, how much more to each of us must the sea of literature be a pathless immensity

For what can a book be more than the man who wrote it? The brightest genius, perhaps, never puts the best of his own soul into his printed page; and some of the most famous men have certainly put the worst of theirs. Yet are all men desirable companions, much less teachers, fit to be listened to, able to give us advice, even of those who get reputation and command a hearing? Or, to put out of the question that writing which is positively bad, are we not, amidst the multi-beyond our powers of vision or of reach plicity of books and of writers, in continual danger of being drawn off by what is stimulating rather than solid, by curiosity after something accidentally notorious, by what has no intelligible thing to recommend it, except that it is new? Now, to stuff our minds with what is simply trivial, simply curious, or that which at best has but a low nutritive power, this is to close our minds to what is solid and enlarging, and spiritually sustaining. Whether our neglect of the great books comes from our not reading at all, or from an incorrigible habit of reading the little books, it ends in just the same thing. And that thing is ignorance of all the greater literature of the world. To neglect all the abiding parts of knowledge for the sake of the

A lecture given at the London Institution.

—an immensity in which industry itself is useless without judgment, method, discipline; where it is of infinite importance what we can learn and remember, and of utterly no importance what we may have once looked at or heard of. Alas! the most of our reading leaves as little mark even in our own education as the foam that gathers round the keel of a passing boat! For myself, I am inclined to think the most useful part of reading is to know what we should not read, what we can keep out from that small cleared spot in the overgrown jungle of "information," the corner which we can call our ordered patch of fruit-bearing knowledge. Is not the accumulation of fresh books a fresh hindrance to our real knowledge of the old? Does not the multiplicity of volumes become a bar upon our use of any?

In literature especially does it hold we cannot see the wood for the trees. A man of power, who has got more from It is most right that in the great republic books than most of his contemporaries, of letters there should be a freedom of inhas lately said: "Form a habit of read- tercourse and a spirit of equality. Every ing, do not mind what you read, the read-reader who holds a book in his hand, is ing of better books will come when you free of the inmost minds of men past and have a habit of reading the inferior." I present; their lives both within and withcannot agree with him. I think a habit of out the pale of their uttered thoughts are reading idly debilitates and corrupts the unveiled to him; he needs no introducmind for all wholesome reading; I think tion to the greatest; he stands on no cerethe habit of reading wisely is one of the mony with them; he may, if he be so most difficult habits to acquire, needing minded, scribble "doggrel " on his Shelley, strong resolution and infinite pains; and I or he may kick Lord Byron, if he please, hold the habit of reading for mere read- into a corner. He hears Burke perorate, ing's sake, instead of for the sake of the and Johnson dogmatize, and Scott tell his stuff we gain from reading, to be one of border tales, and Wordsworth muse on the the worst and commonest and most un- hillside, without the leave of any man, or wholesome habits we have. Why do we the payment of any toll. In the republic still suffer the traditional hypocrisy about of letters there are no privileged orders or the dignity of literature, literature I mean, places reserved. Every man who has in the gross, which includes about equal written a book, even the diligent Mr. Whitparts of what is useful and what is useless?aker, is in one sense an author; "A book's Why are books as books, writers as writ- a book although there's nothing in't;" ers, readers as readers, meritorious and and every man who can decipher a penny honorable, apart from any good in them, journal is in one sense a reader. And or anything that we can get from them? your general reader," like the grave-digWhy do we pride ourselves on our powers ger in "Hamlet," is hail-fellow with all the of absorbing print, as our grandfathers did mighty dead; he pats the skull of the on their gifts in imbibing port, when we jester; batters the cheek of lord, lady, or know that there is a mode of absorbing courtier; and uses “imperious Cæsar" to print which makes it impossible we can teach boys the Latin declensions. ever learn anything good.out of books?

that | rather than a life," is dead to them: it is a book sealed up and buried.

Our stately Milton said in a passage which is one of the watchwords of the English race, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book." But has he not also said that he would "have a vigilant eye how bookes demeane themselves, as well as men; and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors"? . . . Yes! they do kill the good book who deliver up their few and precious hours of reading to the trivial book; they make it dead for them; they do what lies in them to destroy "the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life;" they "spill that season'd life of man preserv'd and stor'd up in bookes." For in the wilderness of books most men, certainly all busy men, must strictly choose. If they saturate their minds with the idler books, the "good book," which Milton calls "an immortality

But this noble equality of all writers of all writers and of all readers - has a perilous side to it. It is apt to make us indiscriminate in the books we read, and somewhat contemptuous of the mighty men of the past. Men who are most observant as to the friends they make, or the conversation they join in, are carelessness itself as to the books to whom they entrust themselves, and the printed language with which they saturate their minds. Yet can any friendship or society be more important to us than that of the books which form so large a part of our minds and even of our characters? Do we in real life take any pleasant fellow to our homes and chat with some agreeable rascal by our firesides, we who will take up any pleasant fellow's printed memoirs, we who delight in the agreeable rascal when he is cut up into pages and bound in calf?

I have no intention to moralize, or to in