And this is the base and consideration which I have to offer:
that perhaps the taste for shreds and patches of journalistic science
and history is not, as is continually asserted, the vulgar and senile
curiosity of a people that has grown old, but simply the babyish and
indiscriminate curiosity of a people still young and entering history
for the first time. In other words, I suggest that they only tell each
other in magazines the same kind of stories of commonplace portents and
conventional eccentricities which, in any case, they would tell each
other in taverns. Science itself is only the exaggeration and
specialization of this thirst for useless fact, which is the mark of the
youth of man. But science has become strangely separated from the mere
news and scandal of flowers and birds; men have ceased to see that a
pterodactyl was as fresh and natural as a flower, that a flower is as
monstrous as a pterodactyl. The rebuilding of this bridge between
science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind. We
have all to show that before we go on to any visions or creations we can
be contented with a planet of miracles.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF HERALDRY
The modern view of heraldry is pretty accurately represented by the
words of the famous barrister who, after cross-examining for some time a
venerable dignitary of Heralds' College, summed up his results in the
remark that 'the silly old man didn't even understand his own silly old
trade.
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