| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs: told us, in the face of a disinterested comparison
between myself and the miserable creatures of your
experiments, is it not folly to suppose that I am one
of them? Some day I shall recall my past, until that
time shall prove my worthiness I shall not ask for
Virginia's hand, and in this decision she must concur,
for the truth might reveal some insurmountable obstacle
to our marriage. In the meantime let us be friends,
professor, for we are both actuated by the same desire--
the welfare and happiness of your daughter."
The old man stepped forward and took Bulan's hand.
The Monster Men |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Emma McChesney & Co. by Edna Ferber: face in business, she took thorough, conscientious mental stock
of those others who were to be her fellow travelers for twenty-
three days.
For the most part, the first-class passengers were men. There
were American business men--salesmen, some of them, promoters
others, or representatives of big syndicates shrewd, alert, well
dressed, smooth shaven. Emma McChesney knew that she would gain
valuable information from many of them before the trip was over.
She sighed a little regretfully as she thought of those
smoking-room talks--those intimate, tobacco-mellowed business
talks from which she would be barred by her sex.
Emma McChesney & Co. |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: hypothetically, by saying that as far as we can see, where our oceans now
extend they have for an enormous period extended, and where our oscillating
continents now stand they have stood ever since the Silurian epoch; but
that long before that period, the world may have presented a wholly
different aspect; and that the older continents, formed of formations older
than any known to us, may now all be in a metamorphosed condition, or may
lie buried under the ocean.
Passing from these difficulties, all the other great leading facts in
palaeontology seem to me simply to follow on the theory of descent with
modification through natural selection. We can thus understand how it is
that new species come in slowly and successively; how species of different
On the Origin of Species |
