My intention in publishing this Budget in the _Athenæum_ is _to enable those who have been puzzled by one or two discoverers to see how they look in a lump_. The only question is, has the selection been fairly made? To this my answer is, that no selection at all has been made. The books are, without exception, those which I have in my own library; and I have taken _all_--I mean all of the kind: Heaven forbid that I should be supposed to have no other books! But I may have been a collector, influenced in choice by bias? I answer that I never have collected books of this sort--that is, I have never searched for them, never made up my mind to look out for this book or that. I have bought what happened to come in my way at show or auction; I have retained what came in as part of the _undescribed_ portion of miscellaneous auction lots; I have received a few from friends who found them among what they called their rubbish; and I have preserved books sent to me for review. In not a few instances the books have been bound up with others, unmentioned at the back; and for years I knew no more I had them than I knew I had Lord Macclesfield's speech on moving the change of Style, which, after I had searched shops, etc. for it in vain, I found had been reposing on my own shelves for many years, at the end of a summary of Leibnitz's philosophy. Consequently, I may positively affirm that the following list is formed by accident and circumstance alone, and that it truly represents the casualties of about a third of a century. For instance, the large proportion of works { 8} on the quadrature of the circle is not my doing: it is the natural share of this subject in the actual run of events.
[I keep to my plan of inserting only such books as I possessed in 1863, except by casual notice in aid of my remarks. I have found several books on my shelves which ought to have been inserted. These have their titles set out at the commencement of their articles, in leading paragraphs; the casuals are without this formality.[6]]
Before proceeding to open the Budget, I say something on my personal knowledge of the class of discoverers who square the circle, upset Newton, etc. I suspect I know more of the English class than any man in Britain. I never kept any reckoning; but I know that one year with another--and less of late years than in earlier time--I have talked to more than five in each year, giving more than a hundred and fifty specimens. Of this I am sure, that it is my own fault if they have not been a thousand. Nobody knows how they swarm, except those to whom they naturally resort. They are in all ranks and occupations, of all ages and characters. They are very earnest people, and their purpose is _bona fide_ the dissemination of their paradoxes. A great many--the mass, indeed--are illiterate, and a great many waste their means, and are in or approaching penury. But I must say that never, in any one instance, has the quadrature of the circle, or the like, been made a pretext for begging; even to be asked to purchase a book is of the very rarest occurrence--it has happened, and that is all.