After the discovery of the embalming principle, as I
have already described it to you, it occurred to our philosophers that
a laudable curiosity might be gratified, and, at the same time, the
interests of science much advanced, by living this natural term in
installments. In the case of history, indeed, experience
demonstrated that something of this kind was indispensable. An
historian, for example, having attained the age of five hundred, would
write a book with great labor and then get himself carefully embalmed;
leaving instructions to his executors pro tem., that they should cause
him to be revivified after the lapse of a certain period- say five
or six hundred years. Resuming existence at the expiration of this
time, he would invariably find his great work converted into a species
of hap-hazard note-book- that is to say, into a kind of literary arena
for the conflicting guesses, riddles, and personal squabbles of
whole herds of exasperated commentators. These guesses, etc., which
passed under the name of annotations, or emendations, were found so
completely to have enveloped, distorted, and overwhelmed the text,
that the author had to go about with a lantern to discover his own
book. When discovered, it was never worth the trouble of the search.
After re-writing it throughout, it was regarded as the bounden duty of
the historian to set himself to work immediately in correcting, from
his own private knowledge and experience, the traditions of the day
concerning the epoch at which he had originally lived.
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