Pliny the Elder's Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia

A book that consists only of lists of facts can reveal as much about the culture that created it as a novel, a sculpture, or a tragedy. If there were such people as archaeologists of reference books whose purpose was reconstructing lost civilizations from no evidence but their encyclopedias, they would need two skills.
The first would be inductive reasoning, the power of concentrating on the specific items in the lists so as to build up a society. But the bare information-content of the encyclopedia would take them only so far. Just as necessary would be the skill of looking at the principles on which the encyclopedia is constructed and deducing them from what does not appear in any list: the logic of that culture. The lists of facts would tell you the lost civilization’s place-names, its resort-towns, mines, and railroad schedules, but the principles that the encyclopedia uses to classify, group, and sequence information will tell you how it made sense of the world.