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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: reader may wish to be told what this "Bestia audax,"
who so greatly ruffles the tempers of our eclectics, is like.
Here, at starting, is a serious chameleon-like difficulty,
for the bookworm offers to us, if we are guided by their words,
as many varieties of size and shape as there are beholders.
Sylvester, in his "Laws of Verse," with more words than wit, described him as
"a microscopic creature wriggling on the learned page, which, when discovered,
stiffens out into the resemblance of a streak of dirt."
The earliest notice is in "Micrographia," by R. Hooke, folio, London, 1665.
This work, which was printed at the expense of the Royal Society of London,
is an account of innumerable things examined by the author under
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