McClure’s Magazine/Volume 35/Number 1/The Anthropologist at Large

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THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AT LARGE
BY
R. AUSTIN FREEMAN
EDITOR OF THE LONDON "LANCET"
ILLUSTRATIONS BY HENRY RALEIGH

THORNDYKE was not a newspaper reader. He viewed with extreme disfavor all scrappy and miscellaneous forms of literature, which, by presenting a disorderly series of unrelated items of information, tended, he considered, to destroy the habit of consecutive mental effort.
"It is most important," he once remarked to me, "habitually to pursue a definite train of thought, and to pursue it to a finish, instead of flitting indolently from one uncompleted topic to another, as the newspaper reader is so apt to do. Still, there is no harm in a daily paper—so long as you don't read it."
Accordingly, he patronized a morning paper, and his method of dealing with it was characteristic. After breakfast, the paper was laid on the table, together with a blue pencil and a pair of office shears. A preliminary glance through the sheets enabled him to mark with the pen those paragraphs that were to be read; these were presently cut out and looked through, after which they were either thrown away or aside to be pasted in an indexed book. The whole proceeding occupied, on an average

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