B. Name some common thing that you have always wanted to have explained to you. (By so doing you may get an explanation from a classmate in the next set of themes.)

C. Name some social custom or conventionality that seems absurd to you, and ask for an explanation.

D. Name some great topic in history, in science, in morals, or in government, that you do not understand.

E. What is the purpose of the writer of each of the following selections? Just what is it that he wishes us to understand and appreciate? Does he make himself clear to you at every point?

1. There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more striking to man's eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and to see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every nook along the shore is enough to infect a silly human with alarm. Perhaps they are only acold, and no wonder, standing waist deep in the stream. Or, perhaps, they have never got accustomed to the speed and fury of the river's flux, or the miracle of its continuous body. Pan once played upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river, he still plays upon these later generations down all the valley of the Oise and plays the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the beauty and the terror of the world.

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2. Whence comes that bashfulness which men of great ability so often feel in addressing a large assembly? How happens it that a man who never hesitates or stammers in pouring out his thoughts to a friend, is embarrassed or struck dumb if he attempts to say the same things, however suitable, to fifty persons? Whately finds a solution of the problem in the curious and complex play of sympathies which takes

place in a large assembly, and which increases in proportion to its numbers. In addressing a large assembly, a person knows that each hearer sympathizes both with his own. anxiety to acquit himself well, and also with the same feelings in the minds of the rest. He knows that every slip or blunder he may make, tending to excite mirth, pity, or contempt, will make a stronger impression on each of the hearers from their mutual sympathy and their consciousness of it, and this doubles his anxiety. Again, he knows that each hearer, putting himself mentally in the speaker's place, sympathizes with this increased anxiety, which is, by this thought, increased still more; and finally, if he becomes at all embarrassed, the knowledge that there are so many to sympathize, not only with that embarrassment, but also with each other's feelings on the perception of it, heightens the speaker's confusion to the extreme, and makes him, perhaps, speechless. MATHEWS: The Great Conversers, 249.

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3. The learned gentleman has risen in righteous indignation to denounce the restriction of production by trades unions. The gentleman probably never heard of a "racer" pacemaker." He has never seen old men, men weak from sickness or hunger, compelled to keep pace with a highly trained athletic workman, who had, in turn, been bribed to exert himself to the utmost. He has not seen these things take place where such feverish haste means imminent danger of deadly crippling accidents. If he had, he might possibly consider the union regulation limiting output as a simple law against murder. He never worked in the steel mills or in the packing houses, where monstrous and complicated mechanism compels the human cog who fits into this mechanical monster to move with it or be crushed crushed either literally in the iron and steel machines or thrown out of work to be crushed by the equally pitiless

and deadly social machine. He has not seen these "mechanical bosses speeded just a trifle faster each month and year until only the youngest and strongest can stand the pace. This means that when the youth of the race is ground into profits, the manhood and old age are thrown out to die.

4. "The average judgment" what sway it bears over us! Deference to the views of others is the principle of our institutions and actions. Each man wishes to be a "good fellow"; that is, so to act as to meet the approval of the greatest number of other "fellows." He averages himself with the rest by everlastingly exchanging ideas and articles, of the appreciable sort, with his fellow beings. Small wonder that the wholesalers of our food, clothing, medicines, and musical machines know that their products will sweep the land. An article once favored must run its course, like a fad. We buy it because others do; we deceive ourselves into approval of it in imitation of a like self-deception on the part of our acquaintances. Yet we call ourselves the most individual people on earth! As a whole we have lost the inclination and capacity of separate selfhood.

KNOX: Our Lost Individuality, Atlantic, 104: 818.

5. Nearly every one knows that for rustic cottages an excellent effect for outdoor planting can be had by using clumps of the gigantic fern or brake which grows in wild and swampy places, but it is not as well known that the great tufts of swamp grasses which one finds along the same places are as decorative as the flowering pampas grass. It is a great gain to learn the beauty of common things, and it is surprising how soon it is recognized by every one when they are lifted from the roadside or pasture into a place of honor beside the dwelling-house.-WHEELER: The Decorative Use of Wild Flowers, Atlantic, 95: 634.

Common Methods of Exposition.

102. The common methods of exposition have been fully explained and illustrated on pages 64 to 105 of this book. They are:

(1) Repetition of the idea in other forms.

(2) Comparison or contrasts.

(3) Particulars and details.
(4) Specific instances.

(5) Causes and effects.

These will be referred to in the present chapter only as they may be needed in connection with the larger problems of exposition to be treated in the following pages.

Why we Fail to Understand.

103. The principal reason why people fail to understand the subjects with which they have to do in the ordinary business of life, is not that they lack ideas about them, but that the ideas they have are in a state of disorder or confusion. This is indicated by the wellknown comment on any difficult subject, that we "can't make head or tail of it," meaning that our ideas about it have no system or unity. Again, we sometimes say that we are "all mixed up or that our minds are "in a whirl," meaning that we cannot reduce our thoughts to order and regularity. It will be a help to us in our study of exposition to see how this disorder arises and to consider how it may be overcome.

There are three principal causes of confusion in people's ideas about any subject:

1. The subject may be so strange and novel that they are unable to connect it in an orderly way with any of the ideas already in their minds.

2. The subject may appear to contain ideas that are inconsistent and contradictory.

3. The subject may be too large or too complex for the mind to grasp all at once.

These causes will be examined in turn.

104.

Assignments on Failing to Understand.

difficult to underHas the writer of Is the first sentence

A. The following selection has been found stand by many second-year high school pupils. it begun with an easy statement or a hard one? clear to you? Would he have done better to begin: "What is a day? When does a day begin? And when does it end?" Point out all of the places that are dark to you. Do you think the trouble is with the strangeness of the subject? Are any ideas inconsist ent? Or is the subject in itself too complex for you?

It seems to me that any person who endeavors to obtain a philosophical idea of the nature of our mode of computing time by days, must see the impossibility of marking any precise limit for the commencement and close of time. Nothing is so indefinite, if we take an enlarged and philosophical view of the subject, as the first day. Astronomers commence it at twelve o'clock at noon. Some nations begin it at midnight. On shore it is reckoned as commencing at one hour, and at sea, as at another. The day, too, begins at a different time in every different place, so that a ship at sea, beginning a day in one place and ending it in another, sometimes will have twenty-three and one-half and sometimes twenty-four and one-half hours in her day, and no clock or timepiece whatever can keep her time. An officer of the ship is obliged to determine the beginning of the day every