But we hope for more extensive and important benefits than these, from
furnishing a medium by which much valuable information may become a sort
of common property among those who can appreciate and use it. We do not
anticipate any holding back by those whose "NOTES" are most worth
having, or any want of "QUERIES" from those best able to answer them.
Whatever may be the case in other things, it is certain that those who
are best informed are generally the most ready to communicate knowledge
and to confess ignorance, to feel the value of such a work as we are
attempting, and to understand that if it is to be well done they must
help to do it. Some cheap and frequent means for the interchange of
thought is certainly wanted by those who are engaged in literature, art,
and science, and we only hope to persuade the best men in all, that we
offer them the best medium of communication with each other.
By this time, we hope, our readers are prepared to admit that our title
(always one of the most difficult points of a book to settle), has not
been imprudently or unwisely adopted. We wish to bring together the
ideas and the wants, not merely of men engaged in the same lines of
action or inquiry, but also (and very particularly) of those who are
going different ways, and only meet at the crossings, where a helping
hand is oftenest needed, and they would be happy to give one if they
knew it was wanted. In this way we desire that our little book should
take "NOTES," and be a medley of all that men are doing--that the Notes
of the writer and the reader, whatever be the subject-matter of his
studies, of the antiquary, and the artist, the man of science, the
historian, the herald, and the genealogist, in short, Notes relating to
all subjects but such as are, in popular discourse, termed either
political or polemical, should meet in our columns in such
juxta-position, as to give fair play to any natural attraction or
repulsion between them, and so that if there are any hooks and eyes
among them, they may catch each other.
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