Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/115

 them satisfactorily The greatest need at present, in all parts of the world, is a library of books of simple information, simply written. Today I bought a book on Africa, by Sir H. H. Johnston. The introduction is interesting, but the remaining hundreds of pages contain a lot of technical information that no one wants. My impression is that Sir H. H. Johnston wrote the introduction, and the remaining pages were taken from old books on the subject. Cyclopedias are made in the same way. Some time ago I read the confession of a cyclopedia editor. He says such books are full of errors, because of the habit of copying, and that there is too little independent investigation. He relates that as an editor he once invented a man, a "noted clergyman," and sent a "story" about him to the printers. The "story" passed the scrutiny of all the other editors, and was about to be made up into the pages of the cyclopedia, when the joker took it out. That is the way historical books are printed; they are too long, very dull, full of errors, written in a ponderous style that repels readers, and lacking in the simplicity and terseness necessary for the understanding of the average reader. There are several "libraries" of "universal knowledge," and not one of them is half as good, as useful or as entertaining as it could have been made. The lack in all these books is simplicity; the professors write in fear of the criticism of other professors, and not for busy people. In this book on Africa, about all I found of interest was a statement that the Australoid type of man is almost certainly the parent of the white man in Europe and Asia. The Australoid, represented at present by the indige