| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: from Canterbury and Maidstone in Kent, and from Farnham in Surrey,
besides what are brought from London, the growth of those and other
places.
Enquiring why this fair should be thus, of all other places in
England, the centre of that trade; and so great a quantity of so
bulky a commodity be carried thither so far; I was answered by one
thoroughly acquainted with that matter thus: the hops, said he, for
this part of England, grow principally in the two counties of
Surrey and Kent, with an exception only to the town of Chelmsford
in Essex, and there are very few planted anywhere else.
There are indeed in the west of England some quantities growing: as
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: slavery while we boasted of being the Land of the Free--and then, when we
arose to abolish slavery, how she "jack-knived" and gave aid and comfort
to the slave power when it had its fingers upon our throat. Many of that
generation of my elders never wholly got over the rage and the wound.
They hated all England for the sake of less than half England. They
counted their enemies but never their friends. There's nothing unnatural
about this, nothing rare. On the contrary, it's the usual, natural,
unjust thing that human nature does in times of agony. It's the Henry
Ward Beechers that are rare. In times of agony the average man and woman
see nothing but their agony. When I look over some of the letters that I
received from England in 1915--letters from strangers evoked by a book
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: 50 years old, three dicotyledonous plants germinated: I am certain of the
accuracy of this observation. Again, I can show that the carcasses of
birds, when floating on the sea, sometimes escape being immediately
devoured; and seeds of many kinds in the crops of floating birds long
retain their vitality: peas and vetches, for instance, are killed by even
a few days' immersion in sea-water; but some taken out of the crop of a
pigeon, which had floated on artificial salt-water for 30 days, to my
surprise nearly all germinated.
Living birds can hardly fail to be highly effective agents in the
transportation of seeds. I could give many facts showing how frequently
birds of many kinds are blown by gales to vast distances across the ocean.
On the Origin of Species |
