Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

nature" of the American people; it will make us "gentler in our thoughts and feelings because of the Alpine strain" (and this includes the Slav). We shall find ourselves "with a higher power to enjoy the beautiful things of life because of the Celtic and the Latin blood." And as if this prophecy of emotional benefit was not heartening enough, Professor Giddings holds up to us the high hope of an intellectual benefit, probably through the commingling of bloods. "We shall become more clearly and more fearlessly rational,— in a word more scientific."

[ocr errors]

- BRANDER MATTHEWS, The American of the Future, in Century, 74: 474.

2. In mechanics it is part of the engineer's profession to consider carefully the amount of physical weight and pressure which various substances will bear-how many pounds a given girder will sustain; how much an upright. It is upon this science and its carefully figured mathematical details that the safety and well-being of the housed community so largely depend. Sometimes, to be sure, even the most carefully estimated plans are spoiled by some unforeseen and unforeseeable weakness in the structural material, and it gives way at a pressure or strain apparently none too great for its endurance. But these occasional obsessions of inanimate nature do not discourage the engineer, or make him abandon his interminable mathematics. In spite of them, or on account of them, he continues his studies so that he may better succeed in placing on the materials which he uses no grievous burden and may not subject them to a stress or strain forbidden by natural law. Collapses of buildings are less frequent, and community life becomes safer as this expert knowledge, founded on study and experience, grows broader and surer.

ALGER, Moral Overstrain, in Atlantic, 93: 496.

3. Who would ever think, to look at a dull fragment of steel, that such a piece of metal had an internal history! But if the same inert, apparently insensible, piece of metal be polished and suitably prepared for examination under the microscope, its internal organism is more clearly and surely shown than the interior skeleton of a man when pierced by the X-ray.

BOYNTON: Anatomy of the Steel Rail, Harper's, 112: 585.

Need of Exposition.

100. When we consider how vague and confused are the ideas of the majority of persons upon the important questions of life, such as questions of politics, economics, morals, and art, and also how necessary it is for the conduct of the world's business that their ideas upon these subjects should be clear, we can easily understand why there has sprung up a distinct class of writing which has for its object the explanation of things hard to understand. It may be doubted whether any other kind of discourse is so directly useful as this kind. Without it we might know and communicate to others the particulars of our experience; but the meaning of these particulars, the general principles that underlie them, could not be definitely set forth. It is chiefly by means of exposition that the teacher instructs his class, the scientist proclaims his discoveries, the inventor makes known his inventions. That one age is able to surpass the foregoing in knowledge is due, in large part, to the fact that by means of exposition we pass on the results of study and investigation from one generation to the next.

It is not only in these great matters that exposition is necessary. It is equally true in the small matters of daily life and experience that a clear understanding of what is appropriate, and why it is appropriate, and how it is to be done, avoids thousands of blunders, embarrassments, and petty annoyances. The ability to explain the principle involved in the smaller conventionalities of life, and in the common operations that go on in business and in every household, is a daily necessity for somebody.

101. Assignments on the Need of Exposition.

A. Explain orally to the class that one of the following about which you are best informed:

[ocr errors]

1. How to turn off the water in case the house is in danger of being flooded.

2. What use should be made of the kitchen sink and what use should not be made of it.

3. How to read a water-meter or a gas-meter.

4. How to regulate a hot-air furnace.

5. What to do in case of a severe burn, and the reason.

6. How to tell an oak tree from an elm.

7. What to do and what not to do in making a camp-fire with reasons.

8. How to proceed in trying to sell a magazine subscription. 9. How to organize a literary club, with reasons for your recommendations.

10. How to breathe, how to swim, how to sit properly, how to stand properly.

11. How to get a history lesson. 12. How to write a news item.

13. How to decorate a library.

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.

:

STEVENSON: The Oise in Flood.

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.

[ocr errors]

3. The learned gentleman has risen in righteous indignation to denounce the restriction of production by tradeş unions. The gentleman probably never heard of a "racer or "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

[ocr errors]
« AnteriorContinuar »