PAPERS PRESENTED AT GENERAL SESSIONS 105 



heed of them unless the evidence is found in literature 

 more complimentary to the reader. 



The literature above quoted has been T\-ritten for the 

 general reader. One of the books expressly says so, on 

 its title page. If the general reader is to be fed upon 

 imagination, Avhy not give him something like this ? — 



Oxygen is the most abundant terrestrial substance 

 known. It is also the most important to our lives, if it 

 is logical to compare the importance of essentials. Its 

 importance is certainly the most obvious. That it is 

 the breath of life is known to everyone whose education 

 has progi'essed as far as the word oxygen. It supplies 

 the warmth and movement of our bodies. It heats the 

 fire that cooks a meal, warms a dwelling or actuates a 

 boiler. The progress and noise of a railroad train are 

 but other modes of a motion of molecule, atom, electron 

 or something still nearer the infinitesimal, that, shortly 

 before, was going on with inconceivable speed, but si- 

 lently, invisibly, impalpably, in the oxygen of the air 

 about our heads. 



In the animal processes carbon is the chief discard or 

 waste. Oxygen is inhaled, picks up the carbon, and goes 

 out with it. Then, with its load, the oxygen is wafted 

 by atmospheric currents to a contact, at the appropriate 

 time, with a trap which nature operates intermittently 

 in green foliage. There the carbon is caught, and the 

 oxygen, probably aided by an impetus from the sun, flies 

 away to be again wafted by atmospheric currents to with- 

 in the reach of the breathing of an animal that has eaten 

 the carbon secreted by a leaf, when the cycle is repeated. 



If the last two paragraphs are wild in imagining all the 

 work to come from the oxygen, let them be modified so 

 as to read part from the oxygen and part from the car- 

 bon. The writer does not believe, nor disbelieve, them. 

 He simply feels that without evidence they come as near 

 being good poetry as the rhetorical specimens above 

 quoted, which, without evidence, have been thrown at him 

 as facts. 



Mr. G. K. Chesterton, who, whether or not thougtt of 

 as ''glib", is not likely to be accused of assumptions, 



