| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very
proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and
orange-juice landscapes. The PERE Gilpin had the kind of science I
like in the study of Nature, - a little less observation than White
of Selborne, but a little more poetry. - Just think of applying the
Linnaean system to an elm! Who cares how many stamens or pistils
that little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may have
to classify it by? What we want is the meaning, the character, the
expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual.
There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if
well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: Shandy died and was duly buried, while yet his theory lay
forgotten and neglected by his fellow-countrymen. But,
reader, the day will come, I hope, when a paternal government
will stamp out, as seeds of national weakness, all depressing
patronymics, and when godfathers and godmothers will soberly
and earnestly debate the interest of the nameless one, and
not rush blindfold to the christening. In these days there
shall be written a 'Godfather's Assistant,' in shape of a
dictionary of names, with their concomitant virtues and
vices; and this book shall be scattered broadcast through the
land, and shall be on the table of every one eligible for
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: substance be either squeezed or strained in one direction, the
molecular symmetry, and with it the symmetry of the ether, is
immediately destroyed and the glass becomes doubly refractive.
Unequal heating produces the same effect. Thus mechanical strains
reveal themselves by optical effects; and there is little doubt that
in Faraday's experiment it is the magnetic strain that produces the
rotation of the plane of polarization.[2]
Footnotes to Chapter 10
[1] 'By a diamagnetic,' says Faraday, 'I mean a body through which
lines of magnetic force are passing, and which does not by their
action assume the usual magnetic state of iron or loadstone.'
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