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INTELLECTUAL_MECHANISM

                                             May 21, 2010

                                             LONG_VIEW

H.G. Wells in "The Outline of History" (1920):

  "It is curious to note how slowly the mechanism of the intellectual
  life improves.  Contrast the ordinary library facilities of a
  middle-class English home, such as the present writer is now
  working in, with the inconveniences and deficiencies of the
  equipment of an Alexandrian writer, and one realizes the enormous
  waste of time, physical exertion, and attention that went on
  through all the centuries during which that library flourished.
  Before the present writer lie half a dozen books, and there are
  good indices to three of them.  He can pick up any one of these six
  books, refer quickly to a statement, verify a quotation, and go on
  writing.  Contrast with that the tedious unfolding of a rolled
  manuscript.  Close at hand are two encyclopaedias, a dictionary, an
  atlas of the world, a biographical dictionary, and other books of
  reference.  They have no marginal indices, it is true; but that
  perhaps is asking for too much at present.  There were no such
  resources in the world in 300 B.C.  Alexandria had still to produce
  the first grammar and the first dictionary.  This present book is
  being written in manuscript; it is then taken by a typist and
  typewritten very accurately.  It can then, with the utmost
  convenience, be read over, corrected amply, rearranged freely,
  retyped, and recorrected.  The Alexandrian author had to dictate or
  recopy every word he wrote.  Before he could turn back to what he
  had written previously, he had to dry his last words by waving them
  in the air or pouring sand over them; he had not even
  blotting-paper.  Whatever an author wrote had to be recopied again
  and again before it could reach any considerable circle of readers,
  and every copyist introduced some new error.  Whenever a need for
  maps or diagrams arose, there were fresh difficulties.  Such a
  science as anatomy, for example, depending as it does upon accurate
  drawing, must have been enormously hampered by the natural
  limitations of the copyist.  The transmission of geographical fact
  again must have been almost incredibly tedious.  "No doubt a day
  will come when a private library and writing-desk of the year
  A.D. 1919 will seem quaintly clumsy and difficult; but, measured by
  the standards of Alexandria, they are astonishingly quick,
  efficient, and economical of nervous and mental energy."

   -- p.345-7, Chapter XXIV, "Science and Religion at Alexandria"

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