| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: though not so important as those which precede and follow it,
illustrates throughout his strength as an experimenter. The power
of spongy platinum to cause the combination of oxygen and hydrogen
had been discovered by Dobereiner in 1823, and had been applied by
him in the construction of his well-known philosophic lamp. It was
shown subsequently by Dulong and Thenard that even a platinum wire,
when perfectly cleansed, may be raised to incandescence by its
action on a jet of cold hydrogen.
In his experiments on the decomposition of water, Faraday found that
the positive platinum plate of the decomposing cell possessed in an
extraordinary degree the power of causing oxygen and hydrogen to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: the face of all their writings; which is the one key-note on which
they ring perpetual changes), that the cause of the Church in France
was not that of humanity, but of inhumanity; not that of nature, but
of unnature; not even that of grace, but of disgrace. Truely or
falsely, they complained that the French clergy had not only
identified themselves with the repression of free thought, and of
physical science, especially that of the Newtonian astronomy, but
that they had proved themselves utterly unfit, for centuries past,
to exercise any censorship whatsoever over the thoughts of men:
that they had identified themselves with the cause of darkness, not
of light; with persecution and torture, with the dragonnades of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: "And what about you, my good sir?" Captain
Whalley laughed a deep soft laugh. "YOU are an im-
provement, surely."
He continued in a vein of pleasantry. A good cigar
was better than a knock on the head--the sort of wel-
come he would have found on this river forty or fifty
years ago. Then leaning forward slightly, he became
earnestly serious. It seems as if, outside their own sea-
gypsy tribes, these rovers had hated all mankind with
an incomprehensible, bloodthirsty hatred. Meantime
their depredations had been stopped, and what was the
End of the Tether |
