We roam into unhealthy climates and encounter difficulties and dangers in search of curiosities and knowledge although, if our industry were equally exerted at home, we might find in the tablets of Nature and Art, within our daily reach, inexhaustible sources of inquiry and contemplation. We are on every side surrounded by interesting objects but in nature as in morals, we are apt to contemn self-knowledge to look abroad rather than at home and to study others instead of ourselves. Like the French Encyclopædists, we forget our own Paris or like editors of newspapers, we seek for novelties in every quarter of the world, losing sight of the superior interests of our immediate vicinity.
