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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 Decora tive 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.

A. The following selection has been found difficult to understand by many second-year high school pupils. Has the writer of it begun with an easy statement or a hard one? Is the first sentence 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 inconsistent? 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

noon by astronomical observation. A sea captain can often make a difference of an hour in the length of his day by the direction in which he steers his ship; because a day begins and ends in no two places, east and west of each other, at the same time. At Jerusalem they are six hours in advance of us in their time, and at the Sandwich Islands six hours behind. In consequence of this, it is evident that the ship, changing her longitude, must every day change her reckoning. These sources of difficulty in marking out the limits of a day, increase as we go toward the pole. A ship, within fifty miles of it, might sail round on a parallel of latitude, and keep it one continual noon or midnight to her all the year; only noon and midnight would be there almost the same. At the pole itself all distinction between day and night entirely and utterly ceases; summer and winter are the only change. Habitable regions do not indeed extend to the pole, but they extend far beyond any practical distinction between noon and midnight, or evening and morning.

The difference between the times of commencing and of ending days in different parts of the earth is so great, that a ship, sailing around the globe, loses a whole day in her reckoning, or gains a whole day, according to the direction in which she sails. If she sets out from Boston, and passes round Cape Horn, and across the Pacific Ocean, to China, thence through the Indian and Atlantic oceans home, she will find, on her arrival, that it is Tuesday with her crew, when it is Wednesday on shore. Each of her days will have been a little longer than a day is in any fixed place, and of course she will have had fewer of them. So that if the passengers are Christians, and have endeavored to keep the Sabbath, they will not and cannot have corresponded with any Christian nation whatever in the times of their observance of it. J. ABBOTT.

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B. Name a rather difficult thing that you have mastered and feel prepared to explain to some one. Write the explanation of it. The following may suggest one of your own accomplishments:

1. How a skater learns to cut a figure 8 in the ice.

2. How an aeroplane is maintained in the air when it is heavier than the air.

3. How a bill in the legislature becomes a law.

4. How to train a dog to sit up and beg for food.

5. How to tread water, or to swim on your back, or to run an automobile.

6. How to distinguish the "absolute construction" in English from the "hanging participle."

7. How to open a savings account at a bank.

8. How to write a promissory note.

9. How to make a telephone system.

10. How to make a willow whistle.

11. The best card trick.

12. How hay is cured, or butter is made, or a sponge-cake, or a Welsh rarebit.

C. Do you have any difficulty in understanding parts of the following? If so, mark them and bring them up in class.

Almost the only noxious animal of Samoa is the mosquito, but this is truly a fearful pest; not simply as a buzzing and stinging torment, but as the intermediate host and disseminator of the dreadful scourge elephantiasis. This is a form of filariasis in which the minute parasitic filariæ lodge in the lymphatic glands, and produce a remarkable hypertrophy of the subcutaneous tissue, so that a man's leg may come to weigh as much as all the rest of his body, or his arm be simply a great useless cylindrical mass a foot in diameter. The specific cause of the disease is the parasitic blood-worm Filaria sanguinis hominis, which passes part of its life in

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