Questions and Topics for Study 149 



To the Lord Mayor of London (pages 24-26) 



1. Is this a real letter, or is it the outline of the speech that 

 Huxley would have delivered if he could have attended the 

 meeting? 



2. What two kinds of service had Pasteur rendered? 



To John Tyndall (page 26) 



1. How did the sunshine suggest Tennyson's poems? 



2. Can you name any poem or cite any passages in which 

 Tennyson shows his familiarity with science? 



To a Young Man (pages 26-27) 



1. Write the letter that you suppose the young man wrote. 



2. What sentence in Huxley's letter puts drudgery in a new 

 light? 



3. What does the Scotch proverb mean? 



On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge 

 (pages 28-46) 



The selections that follow, whether called lay sermons, ad- 

 dresses, or lectures, are really essays and were so considered 

 by Huxley when he included them in his Collected Essays. 

 There are, however, two kinds of essay, the chatty, humor- 

 ous, personal essay as written by Addison, Steele, Lamb, and 

 Thackeray, and the more carefully constructed and more seri- 

 ously expository essay as written by Macaulay, Carlyle, 

 Arnold, and Lowell. Huxley's essays belong to the second 

 class: they are studied attempts to expound important truths. 

 It will be found that each essay presents some central thought 

 or thoughts. Each essay, in other words, has unity. It will 

 be found also that the structure of each essay is determined 

 solely by the desire to present these central thoughts as clearly 

 and as vividly as possible. The questions that follow, there- 

 fore, are intended to help you to appreciate, (i) the thought- 

 content of each essay, and (2) the architecture by which the 

 thought-content is made clear. 



