Bacon, we may remember, exempted only knowledge of things divine from his scheme for the progress of knowledge. Three hundred and fifty years later I find it comforting that as great a scientist and thinker as Sir Peter Medawar saw no reason to demur when he said, in that wonderful little book of his The Limits of Science: "In the world of science anything that is possible in principle can be done if the intention to do it is sufficiently resolute and long sustained."
Some of what I have to say today concerns the British Library, a national treasure (though I know that resource is now the preferred word) which is, as far as its collections are concerned the envy of the world. We owe that, as Cecil Oldman pointed out in a lecture given at University College twenty-five years ago, to Sir Anthony Panizzi: the first professor of Italian at University College, and the one who drew up the scheme for the College's catalogue in three days. I have to listen patiently, these days, to librarians who wish to engage my sympathy for their hard-pressed situation, and it is sometimes difficult to restrain myself from reminding them of what librarians like Panizzi had to overcome, and what they achieved in an age which did not benefit from electricity and computers. Do not take my word for his astonishing achievement - take Oldman's. Appointed as an Additional Assistant Keeper on April 27, 1831 [the word additional signified regrettable necessity] he rose, as we know, to become what an affectionate biographer has termed The Prince of Librarians. Long before Parliament decided to enact the statute which created the British Library, Oldman could pronounce that "the English nation now possesses a National Library of which it can be justly proud", and that the credit was due to Panizzi more than any other. As in all things which he was required to consider, Cecil Oldman was scrupulously just and magnanimous, and his assessment of Panizzi is probably the best ever written. He had detachment - a rare quality, getting rarer by the minute. But he also recognised the virtue of passion - a quality which Panizzi, the son of an apothecary from Brescello, certainly possessed, but which seems to have disappeared altogether. When Oldman retired in 1959, his colleagues presented him with a tribute which no other Principal Keeper has ever received: a beautifully produced catalogue of remarkable acquisitions for the nation during his tenure. The preface is unsigned, as is the remarkable binding of the Library's only copy, but in its quiet, restrained English way of paying tribute it tells of the affection and esteem which the staff of the Library felt for a scholar-librarian whose career brought to an end a tradition going back over a century. There are still a handful of former colleagues who haunt Bloomsbury: Alec Hyatt King, Music Librarian; Laurence Wood, Keeper of Printed Books; Philip Harris, Deputy Superintendent of the Reading Room; Helen Wallis, Map Librarian. When I told them that I was going to give this lecture in his honour, they all asked one question: "Well: what are you going to say?"
It is as fashionable today as it was when C.P. Snow wrote his Two Cultures to find the pursuers of that kind of knowledge which can never be satisfactorily defined dismissing those engaged in science and technology as the modern equivalents of the mythical Hephaestus, and the pursuers of that kind of knowledge which can be defined dismissing the humanities, and indeed many of what we now presumptuously call the social sciences, as expeditions in search of truths which do not exist. The frontier between what is ultimately knowable and what is not seems to have changed little in the last few thousand years in Western civilization.
For Oriental civilizations, such as those which derive from the settlements around the great rivers of the Middle East, India and China the story is somewhat different, and in no discipline can the differences between East and West be so decisively observed as in medicine. Its history is probably one of the most fascinating for historical study, since it embraces much of what is knowable and a great deal of what we call magic. It is also the one discipline for which we feel uncommon respect, whether we inhabit the hospitable suburbs of Leeds or the inhospitable forests of Amazonia - especially when we are individually sick: sick of body or sick of mind. To what discipline, I hear you ask, do we turn when the sickness is not individual but collective? Since I am neither shaman nor seer I do not propose to offer you a solution this afternoon; what I do hope to offer is a view of the role that libraries have played in providing the sources for possible answers, and must continue to provide if we are not to succumb to another Dark Age of ignorance at a time when the world is not deprived of knowledge and information but threatened with its deluge.
Of the Bodleian Library Bacon said that it was "an Ark to save us from deluge". That was when there existed in this country no single library which could satisfy curiosity about what was known and recorded in books, and it is hard to see how Bacon's grand strategy for the reformation of learning could have been effected without the development of libraries. Today, we have huge libraries - some so huge that they defy comprehension, even by those who administer them - and their resources multiply at an alarming rate. So large, and so complex have these institutions become that we no longer appoint librarians to superintend them, preferring to delegate responsibility to that species of manager capable of running hotel chains or conglomerate corporations. Lest you become excited to sense in the tone and temper of my discourse that I am about to engage some philistine enemy in battle, let me assure you that there are many participants in the secularization of learning for which Bacon was a passionate advocate: universities must take a share of the blame for reducing learning to the mere production of verbiage, as must libraries for acquiring that verbiage, and when I hear scholars complaining about how much sixteenth-century English printing has been lost, I often wish that more had perished. As we get closer to our own time, the sheer volume of what survives becomes truly daunting.
Let me give you a single, and simple statistic. If one were to inaugurate a library tomorrow with no more intellectually demanding a philosophy than to collect every piece of printing from every country in the world published in 1988, one would, at a stroke, create a library larger than that which Panizzi handed on to posterity when he retired as Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum in 1866. Statistically, it would be impressive; but how much, I wonder, would it contribute to learning? In order to grasp the general direction in which my thinking is proceeding, let me give you another statistic. The total collections of the British Library, accommodated on over four hundred miles of shelving, contain some forty million discrete items in the form of books (printed and manuscript), newspapers, private and official papers and archives, prints and drawings, maps, music and a wide range of philatelic materials. Of this staggering total there are quite literally millions of items which are, to all intents and purposes, inaccessible. This, in spite of the fact that for most of its history the Library has been inadequately funded. While it is true that the Museum benefited from great and enlightened benefactions, the catalogue of what it failed to acquire (because of obstinacy by the Treasury and the Trustees) is an appalling chronicle as it appears in the records of Trustees' Minutes. What, I sometimes ask myself, would it now be like if the Chancellors of the Exchequer between 1847 and 1973 (the year in which the British Library was created) had been men of enlightenment and vision and had sanctioned the repeated requests of Principal Librarians for more funds to acquire, catalogue, and house books on the scale adumbrated by Panizzi? Why should I ask myself this question? For the simple reason that I have just completed an inventory of the unpublished handlists, catalogues and indexes to the Library's collections. The published sources are relatively straightforward: the two thousand and eight volumes of the General Catalogue in the Reading Room; the two million-plus items catalogued in machine-readable form and available on BLAISE-LINE; and the seven hundred odd printed catalogues of materials in the Department of Printed Books, the Department of Manuscripts, the Oriental Collections, the Map Library, the Music Library, the Newspaper Library, the India Office Library and Records, the Science Reference Library, and the National Sound Archive. The inventory of unpublished sources exceeds one thousand five hundred items, and describes discrete items in excess of twenty million. I hope that by now you are beginning to understand some of the difficulties implicit in relating libraries with learning.
Let me re-state the problem with reference to two paradigmatic figures: Sir Peter Medawar, the great zoologist, who could say at the end of his distinguished career that while we may never be able to answer those questions about first and last things, we do have some say in what comes next - so what could our destiny be except what we make it? And Verrier Elwin, an extraordinary, self-educated, deeply Christian anthropologist who worked tirelessly for the study of social life in India, and who wrote that remarkable book about the Muria tribe in Central India whose customs included the free and uninhibited indulgence in post-pubertal sex in their dormitory ghotul - without the slightest trace of condescension for their primitive morals or desire to make them conform to British standards. A scientist who is prepared to admit that one of the best short books he ever read was Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie and a Christian missionary who marvelled at the ghotul of the Muria seem to me interesting contemporary models. It has to do with detachment, or to pervert a famous phrase of Eliot's, the subjective correlative.
Libraries, like the human brain, are accumulations of memories which sometimes produce chronicles of indistinct significance and sometimes collocations for which there is no easy explanation. Printing, which brought Europe from darkness into light, was first a privileged invention, which is why the first printed books sought to imitate manuscripts. When Aldus Manutius invented the book which could be afforded, and carried about, he enabled enlightenment, because he made available the texts which were necessary to recover what was known. In a very real sense it was Aldus who was responsible for the deluge. The fate of a manuscript is extremely uncertain, and it is perhaps sad that we do not have Virgil's Aeneid as he would have wished us to have it, or the original text of Beowulf; but, as a result of printing, we have more than enough of what we could well do without. Or could we?
Are we, as puzzled inhabitants of a universe we can never wholly understand, content with the inadequacy of the information upon which perception depends, or must we strive for ever-more efficient methods of explanation? We perceive gravity; we have theories about it; we experience the conseqences of it's force when we fall off a ladder; but we still cannot explain it, nor can we harness it. If science has to do with the laws of physics which can be put to use, why is it that gravity - except in the case of that remarkable clock in the British Museum - stubbornly resists our attempts to harness it? One answer might be that we still do not know enough about it, and that answer is implicit in the philosophy of science which propounds the paradox that within the limits of science the possibilities for discovery are limitless.
Every year the volume of scientific and technological information published increases and no one library can hope to acquire it all. And if we add to this prodigious torrent of information that which derives from governments, industry and the institutions of higher learning it seems to me that we shall soon face a kind of paralysis undreamt of in the naive optimism of those who a century ago believed in material and intellectual progress. You may remember that stalwart band of enthusiasts who, in the 1850s, believed that the advancement of learning lay in the compilation of a universal catalogue of all the books ever printed, and who succeeded in encouraging the Prince Regent to become their patron. A century later we found ourselves not with a single unified inventory of printing, but with literally hundreds of vast catalogues, some of them printed, but most only available locally in card format. Technology, as we know, came to the rescue, and since the 1960s we have witnessed the development of machine-readable catalogues which not only provide enhanced access to the collections of the research libraries of the world, but do so in a form that can be distributed electronically and therefore theoretically available anywhere. For English-speaking countries the total number of machine-readable records available for consultation exceeds thirty million, of which perhaps ten million are unique. By the turn of the century it has been estimated that the world total could be as high as a hundred million, and will include national bibliographies, scientific and technological abstracts and indexes, patent specifications, government and company reports, microfilms, and specialized databases for every significant discipline.
To all this will soon be added vast quantities of retrievable whole texts converted to digitized form (a preferred alternative to microfilm) and, when optical character recognition techniques have improved sufficiently, equally vast quantities of whole text entirely searchable. Given improved communication techniques and software which will make the differences between computer systems transparent to the user, a library will before long cease to be a local repository of information locally needed to supply information to its users and become a gateway to the universe of information held by all libraries. Let us consider some of the possible consequences of this.
The transformation of library materials into electronic form is driven by two factors: the need to protect them from deterioration by constant handling so that they can survive for other generations to study; and the need to reduce staffing levels. With some exceptions, books printed on wood-pulp paper since the middle of the nineteenth century now have a limited life, and no preservation policies, however generously funded, can ensure the survival of the world's stock of such books. For publications originating in many equatorial countries the shelf- life is barely twenty-five years. Given the fact that the cost of processing and preserving such materials is now double the cost of acquiring them, it seems inevitable that large research libraries will have no alternative but to acquire a wide range of newspapers, serials, pamphlets and monographs, convert them to electronic format, and throw them away. For existing stocks of these materials at risk, it is unlikely that conversion can be effected in time, and many thousands will probably be lost for ever.
The new generation of optical discs, which can store one thousand megabytes of data in either fixed or changeable form, will make it possible to provide huge quantities of editable bibliographic data - bibliographic records are necessarily subject to change - in a form accessible via powerful microcomputers, as well as unimaginable quantities of original text. Information - note that I have not said knowledge - will, as a consequence, become portable. I do not think that anyone would dispute the benefits which universal access to information will bring to developed and developing countries alike. But it will have one interesting consequence, already noticeable where large machine-readable files like the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue are concerned. Recently, a student visited me at the Library to discuss the possibility of doing a PhD thesis on romances in the eighteenth century. A quick search of the ESTC on-line file revealed that there were over four hundred romances to be dealt with. Needless to say, she is looking for another more limited topic!
Anyone who has undertaken research which has involved amassing a substantial number of bibliographical references from disparate sources will testify to the fact that their task turned out to be much more arduous, and larger, than anticipated. But as a project grows, both in size and complexity, so the researcher grows with it, being forced by the extent of the material to remain in charge as it were. In the course of compiling a checklist of imaginative literature written by women in the nineteenth century I have had to absorb into what I thought would be a modest file over four thousand writers - a file which started with the sixty-odd names I extracted from the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. If the press of a key had revealed, at the beginning, that my undertaking necessitated dealing with a universe of over twenty thousand titles I think I might have been tempted by a less ambitious challenge. There is, I believe, a very real risk that instantaneous access to huge quantities of information might prove a disincentive to research; and that would, at a stroke, contradict the very purpose for which these files have been created. And if the original materials are themselves only conveniently available in a form which requires them to be examined on a computer screen, it is likely that we will have condemned them to all but occasional use for reference.
Quite apart from the consequences which technological innovation will have on those whose curiosity compels them to consult large numbers of texts, what of the library which is responsible for the publication of its materials in electronic form? A diminution in the numbers of people working in libraries seems to me inevitable; more important, perhaps, is the intellectual quality of library staff. In small institutions, with manageable collections, this may not prove too disagreeable a development; but in large research libraries it is certain to result in a distance between users and materials which skilled librarians with an intimate knowledge of the collections in their custody have traditionally existed to bridge. To staff a library like the British Library with managers and technocrats will have, I suggest, a particularly dispiriting consequence for the political mandarins who would have it as an international public library - it will become progressively less used as a place which researchers visit. I exaggerate, for effect: but we may well find that the hundreds of seats being provided in the new building on Euston Road will be unoccupied, the resources of the library being tapped remotely, the process monitored and controlled by staff with the intellectual competence of telephone operators.
It is axiomatic of progress that solutions to existing problems frequently produce problems orders of magnitude greater, to which ever more daring and expensive solutions must be found. But with the rapid developments in technology the time-frame in which these solutions must be found inexorably shortens. It is also axiomatic of progress that the excitement which generally accompanies a solution - I give you the freeways in Southern California as one example, the Boeing 747 is another - disengages curiosity or concern for possible consequences [it now takes almost as long to travel from the centre of London to the centre of New York as it took fifteen years ago].
The democratization of learning which we witnessed in the two decades following the end of World War II, coupled with that wonderful invention the photocopier, led to the virtual destruction of hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable books in the British Museum Library. Then the conservationists had their moment of glory, and huge sums were voted to repair and conserve the torn and tattered wreckage tied with string. The magnitude of the task, and the peculiar problems which books produced at different times inevitably produce, led to ill-thought strategies which, while giving the books on the shelf a tidy - and therefore bureaucratically acceptable - appearance actually shortened their life even more than would have been the case if nothing had been done. In three years damage was done to an important part of the collections which will take thirty to put right. That is not librarianship: that is downright stupidity.
If libraries are, as I believe them to be, the memory of man, then their custody should be a matter of primary concern to society. That used to be the case, but shows signs of late of becoming pious rhetoric. That is because you now seldom hear librarians talking about books - it is information that they manage. Even the word library is now eschewed by that determined band of jet-set information scientists who congregate every year in the capitals of the world to reform our five-hundred-year love affair with the book. Books will survive, of course. Our grandchildren will be able to read the masterpieces of literature in something akin to the codex, and we will depend upon print for many of the transactions of ordinary life. But what of the great mass of unsorted and unconsidered words and images from the past? Or shall we dismiss that mass as less important than yesterday's patent which, if exploited subtly, might make a fortune out of curing cancer or AIDS?
There are searchers after truth (I call them the detached), and there are searchers after means of recycling money - generally in their direction - (I call them the engaged). Both are necessary for a healthy society. They both depend upon access to information, but they operate in different ways.
The image which Bacon used on the titlepage to his Novum Organum, the first work in his monumental attempt to chart philosophy (the Instauratio Magna), was that of a little ship passing through the pillars of Hercules. The inscription [Daniel 12:4] reads: Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia - "Many shall pass to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." It is no accident that the very same image of the pillars of Hercules forms the heraldic emblem of Charles I of Spain [Holy Roman Emperor Charles V]. In 1668, eight years after the founding of the Royal Society, Joseph Glanvill, chaplian to Charles II, wrote his Plus Ultra, or the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge as a didactic paean to the new science for which Bacon had paved the way. The point of this will not be lost on those who recall that the motto of the Spanish Royal Family had been NE PLUS ULTRA - "nothing beyond".
I assume that most people today engaged in research of whatever kind would still find Bacon's definition of the purpose of knowledge acceptable: "that they seek it neither for pleasure, or contention, or contempt of others or for profit or fame, or for honour and promotion; ... but for the merit and emolument of life." That is to say, the pursuit of knowledge has as its ultimate purpose the improvement of the human condition. Precisely how this noble objective is achieved very much depends upon what is being researched. Bacon confessed to having a "passion for research", and he was undoubtedly a man for whom books were of fundamental importance. By contrast, Newton's contribution to the progress of knowledge was made virtually without reference to books. His genius was sui generis. The procedures for scientific research are, for the most part, as little understood as those in the humanities, and only politicians cherish the naive belief that scientists conduct their work according to a method. This misconception derives, in part, from Mill's A System of Logic [1843] and Karl Pearson's The Grammar of Science [1892], a work which was still in print when I was a student. As with every kind of research with which I am familiar there are many stratagems for testing assumptions in order to determine whether the world of our hypotheses corresponds with the real one. Since the natural universe, and the laws that govern it, is readily available for observation, the universe of the mind, as it is reflected in books and manuscripts, is more fugitive. That makes research in the humanities more like archaeology - sifting fragments of truth from mountains of rubble. And it is in libraries that the humanist researcher typically finds his rubble to sift.
A library which aims to provide printed materials to support both scientific enquiry and humanist research must cater for distinctive communities with different needs. In the case of the British Library, a third community has also to be catered for - technology and commerce. Balancing the needs of three such different communities of users is by no means easy; but I am convinced that the monostructural approach is inappropriate. The difficulty with the alternative, less rigid approach, is that it is bureaucratically untidy, and runs contrary to some cherished Whitehall beliefs - unified grading, and the like. For commerce and industry, genuinely in search of information, immediacy of response to the most up-to-date information on patents dealing with semiconductor physics is called for. For medicine, files like Medline and Toxline are valuable only if they are current. But for a great deal of scientific and technical literature, the principle of half-life applies: which is one reason why the research published in journals so quickly becomes either superseded or merely grist to the historian's mill. And while computer-held indexing to articles on biotechnology has a readily perceived purpose, I have no idea how one could begin to index publications of lasting importance, like J.D. Bernal's Science in History; a book which will still be consulted when the latest article on hyperglycaemia has been relegated to the historical dustbin. Statistics from the British Library's Document Supply Centre at Boston Spa show consistently that the majority of requests from subscribers to the loan/photocopy scheme are for books and journals published in the most recent three years. That is what one would expect. By contrast, the majority of requests for books and journals in Bloomsbury are for items printed before 1900.
The point which needs to be made is this: when a researcher involved in science, technology or industry requests a specific piece of literature it is more than likely that the laboratory in which he carries out his research is not the library from which he requested the document, whereas for much humanist research the library is the laboratory in which discoveries are made. That is as true today in the Reading Room in Bloomsbury as it was in Marx's day. I do not believe that you can administer a library, in the traditional sense, in the same way that you administer a postal service.
On the other hand, I see evidence which suggests that the great research library as we have known it is doomed. The computer, which ten years ago seemed like the only hope for dealing with the sheer volume of what the world's presses were producing, now threatens learning with the supermarket philosophy: you can buy it if you can find it. This would be fine if every item in a research library had its bar-code attached with the relevant information available for computer retrieval. That is one of the problems presented by books which does not apply to tins of baked beans: they are not necessarily what they seem.
I am not alone is voicing disquiet at the apparent disjunction between the management of libraries and the needs of those whose research depends upon them. Tim Weiskel, currently a Henry Luce Fellow at Harvard, has had an interesting academic career: research in archives in Europe; field studies in Africa; a microcomputer laboratory at Yale; with several degrees, one of which is in Library Science and Information Technology. In an article published in Library Hi Tech last month he has pointed out that while librarians have been automating research libraries for their own reasons, researchers (in all fields) have been automating their research methods for their own reasons. A new kind of program, labelled ISIS [for Intengrated Scholarly Information Systems], is now emerging which downloads files from library systems and puts them to the sort of use which scholars understand, but which librarians apparently do not. These programs are able to homogenize bibliographical records from any source into a format which suits the researcher, and the transaction will take minimal time - a lap-top computer equipped with an Intel 486 chip and eraseable CD-ROM drive will be able to download the entire ESTC file in minutes. Because librarians are no longer scholars (like Cecil Oldman) they are in danger of underestimating their principal clients. This observation frequently gets me into difficulties with the Managers of the British Library. They are busily engaged in devising a simple OPAC [Online Public Access Catalogue] which will be so friendly that you would not hesitate to recommend it to your teenage daughter. Yet for a century readers have managed to cope with the opacity of Panizzi's XCI Rules - without benefit of a hint of explanation from the Trustees who sanctioned them. Once understood - and anyone who really wanted to know what books the Museum had soon discovered them - the system was applauded and scholarship flourished. I spend a great deal of my time explaining to both staff and users how databases are structured and familiarising them with search protocol, and it is gratifying to observe how quickly they learn, when there is a need to learn. And that, in spite of the fact that there are, at the latest count, almost four thousand databases available via the academic networks. Many of these databases offer SDI [Selective Diffusion of Information] services that will provide a researcher with automatic updates of material on his/her selected research field, despatched to their electronic mailbox on BITNET or JANET. Local capacity to store vast quantities of electronically retrieved data will be enhanced so that it will, this year, be possible to store 1,000 megabytes of data on a 5.25 floppy disk using a form of electronic storage known as digital paper. Does this sound like anything you hear librarians talking about?
When Panizzi took charge of the British Museum Library he understood the necessity to collect widely, but to describe narrowly. His vision of what a library's catalogue should be, more of an encyclopedia with liberal cross-references than a dictionary, cannot, I fear, be easily adapted to the unitary principle of database design which is now the accepted model. The British Museum headings which have provided historians with fertile sources for material they might otherwise have missed were intended as browsing-tools [ENGLAND - History & Politics; FRANCE - Conseil d'Etat], and the rules governing the placement of books under these headings were detailed and intricate, requiring of the cataloguer a competence beyond that of merely transcribing the titlepage. A library, it seems to me, should attempt to fulfill two primary objectives: inform the user whether or not it possesses a specific book by a specific author, and offer some generalized assistance on what books it possesses on this or that topic. Where the catalogue fails to help, there are probably finding aids about which the user is ignorant, but which the librarian can readily identify. And when all published and unpublished sources fail, there is the librarian who knows the collections who can suggest possibly useful stratagems. The important point I wish to make is that most researchers only need a nudge in the right direction, and one source will lead to others. The problem with automation in libraries is that it excites the belief that knowledge can be available at the press of a button: information, perhaps; knowledge, no.
If the human mind were constructed like a computer; - better still, if computers were constructed like the human mind - then the mechanization of knowledge would be appropriate. The mind, as Milton said, is its own place; unlike any other, and refuses to behave typically. As Medawar has said, to imagine that you can premeditate scientific discovery is as stupid as to imagine that you can premeditate poetry, quoting Shelley's Defence of Poetry to prove his point: "A man cannot say I will write poetry ... the greatest poet even cannot say it."
I have given as the title for this lecture Libraries and Learning. Both are inexhaustible, and both necessary if we are to overcome ignorance and disease. There are no apodictic certainties, a fact which unites the manifold searchers after truth in the world of learning and the libraries which harbour the memory of how man has perceived himself, and the universe of which he is a particular and developing inhabitant. His perceptions have as much to do with resolution as with magnification. There is no theoretical limit to the magnification in optical microscopy of an image, but there is a very definite barrier to distinguishing adjacent objects closer than half the wavelength of visible light. I leave you with a proposition which I doubt either librarians or researchers could refute, but which I hope they will remember when they plan the next phase in the advancement of knowledge: there is no known logic which can add to the meaning of a statement.
There is, if I dare risk pedantry, a great deal of difference between the processes of induction and those of deduction. The latter simply makes explicit the information already known; the former proposes that there is a calculus of discovery. In fact, discovery has to do with hypothesis. The scientist in his laboratory, the humanist in the Reading Room of the British Library has depended upon processes which are neither deductive nor inductive. They are understood by anyone who has struggled to prove a point, whether right or wrong, and they have usually done so with the help of libraries. That is not a proposition I can prove, any more than I can prove the existence of God. It rests upon what Kant called a "kind of consciously imperfect assent." Not enough, perhaps, to stem the tide of a political philistinism which would make learning the harlot of government or commerce, but enough perhaps to remind you that it is easier to tax learning than it is to tax harlotry.