this nose within a nose, as a touchstone, so to speak. The thing became a Symbol.
But here we plunge head over heels into the Subjective, on the other side of which stream lie the misty shades of the Occult. For that is what happens to you when you begin talking about Symbols.
However, we shall not be crossing to the other side on this occasion, my symbolism being after all but a humdrum affair.—Merely this, that to me this organ of Jacobson is the symbol of the Exhaustive—of the minute, punctilious, unwearying, laboured comprehensiveness, Teutonic in its over and under and through, that characterises the genuine, the reliable, scientific treatise and renders it so desperately full of interest—to examinees.
Imagine, if you can, the indignation of kindly Sir Walter were the news ever to reach him in Valhalla that urchins now at school are not only forced to study his light-hearted romances as holiday tasks, but are actually examined upon them !
So, comparing small things with great, let me say: “Absit omen.”
My faith in the spoken charm of that phrase is, however, none too robust. Heaven helps the man who helps himself, And so, by way of rein-
