HOW TO SKIM

READING AND SKIMMING TESTS WITH CURRENT PERIODICALS

Test your speed and accuracy from time to time by measuring yourself as you read or skim articles in periodicals.

Distinguish carefully your purposes.
If you wish merely to find out what an article discusses, and cannot learn this from the headline or opening para­graph, remember that you ought to be able to do it fairly well at the rate of at least 600 words per minute.

If you seek the main facts and arguments of an article, over and above its subject, you ought to skim over 400 words per minute. Here the rate will vary according to the character of the subject.

Keep in mind that it is much harder to skim through ten articles of 1,000 words each than through one article of 10,000 words. Each change of subject compels you to readjust mentally, to work with a fresh set of meanings, hence to warm up to the job.

Keep in mind, too, that familiar topics may be skimmed far faster than strange ones. To the latter you bring fewer word habits. You must think as you read, and that is hard.

Skimming Newspapers

Skimming a newspaper ought not to require more than fifteen to twenty minutes. Professional men usually devote about this time to the task.

You know, of course, that a newspaper is specially organized to make skimming easy. And it would be a fine thing if many other publications would imitate this excellent example.

Read headlines only, at first. And read them at the rate of six words per second or faster.

On a standard newspaper page there may be 400 words or more in all the headlines. Roughly then, you ought to read these in 70 or 80 seconds. With considerable practice and better than average skill, you can double or even treble this rate.

Unless you are reading merely for relaxation, never toil through the full report of a news item which has no practical bearing on your business, or your personal affairs. Read the first few opening lines. They will contain the gist of the event. And that is all you need.

Exercises in Skimming

The purpose of the following exercises is to drill you in catching the essentials of a passage which you lack the time to read straight through.
To get the best results, you ought to have somebody help you by regulating your reading time.

Place a cardboard over the exercise you are about to do. Let your helper have a watch ready, to count seconds.

At the top of each page is indicated the time you are to have for skimming the passage hidden under the cardboard.

When he removes the cardboard, do not try to read the passage line by line; for this will be impossible. Try rather to run your eye down through it, spotting what strikes you as important.

At the end of the allotted time, your helper will replace the cardboard over the passage.

You are then to write down (or dictate) the essential facts you noticed in the passage.

Afterward, compare your report with the passage.

I
(Time allowed is 5 seconds)
Most of this book is devoted to tests which, if carefully done, will improve your reading ability. But if passed over lightly, they will benefit nobody, you least of all. For you will only be wasting such time as you may devote to them, and you may form the notion that they have little utility.

II
(Time allowed is 5 seconds)
Only a child thinks that we read with our eyes alone. Reading is a kind of giving and receiving. We bring to the marks we perceive on the page various subtle mental reactions. Some of these are memories, some thoughts, some emotions. The significance we read into the marks depends, not alone upon these mental responses within ourselves but also upon the entire context of the passage read.

Ill
(Time allowed is 5 seconds)
Colleges waste time and money whenever they train a student having no mathematical ability to be an engineer. They ruin a young man's future happiness whenever they allow him to spend four years of his life mastering foreign languages which he can never put to any use. Society will in time come to insist that education shall all be founded on two inflexible policies: fitting the man to the job, and fitting the job to the world in which the man is going to live.

IV
(Time allowed is 10 seconds)
Herbert Hoover's project to forestall grave business depressions and panics by holding in reserve a sizable fraction of national and state appropriations for large public improvements is one which the leaders of organized labor as well as several distinguished economists have long advocated. No rational criticism of the idea has ever been advanced; and, as there is every reason of prudence to adopt it, we may expect to see it realized. Within a few years America's economic system will become the stablest ever known. And along with its stability will probably, though not certainly, come a steady growth in volume. For where men feel safe, they dare much. Trade expansion will normally increase if traders know that, even at the worst, they will neither cause nor suffer from a widespread collapse.

V
(Time allowed is 10 seconds)
Why does this country not advance more rapidly in its manufacturing? Because consumers cannot buy as fast as factories can make goods for them. Why cannot the consumers keep up with factories? They cannot, in the first place, because our manufacturers and distributors do not pay back to workers and stockholders enough money; and, in the second place, because most consumers have to save part of their earnings and therefore cannot spend for consumption goods even all of that inadequate total which they receive in the form of wages, salaries and dividends.

Money must flow evenly from producer to consumer and back from consumer to producer again, if we are to main­tain steady progress in the expansion of our industrial system.

VI (Time allowed is 10 seconds)
Business men, bankers, and economists disagree profoundly over the wisdom of extending instalment sales further. Every imaginable opinion has been advanced, and the confusion remains profound. Some would-be specialists allege that instalment selling has revolutionized modern life, while others stoutly maintain that it is bringing us to the brink of disaster. E. R. A. Seligman has collected and classified sixty-seven opinions. He finds that they have been based essentially on the success or failure with which instalment selling has been practised by the witness or else by his competitors in the same business. They do not reflect any sound economic judgment, inasmuch as a method that succeeds in one field may fail in another, as a result of special circumstances.

VII (Time allowed is 15 seconds)
There has lately been placed on the market a new balanced aluminum alloy whose composition differs strik­ingly from that of any other commercial product. It is reported to combine lightness and strength more success­fully than any of its many predecessors.

Other aluminum alloys generally contain manganese, copper, silicon or magnesium. This one uses only nickel and chromium. Of such heavy ingredients there is barely two per cent.

The new alloy does not tarnish. It does not rust. It is easy to weld. It resists most chemicals. And it fatigues slowly. The serious effects which salt water has upon aluminum in most forms are barely discernible.

Like all other aluminum alloys, this one owes its strength chiefly to the amount of hard rolling or cold working which it receives while being manufactured. At present it is being produced in four grades representing varing amounts of such treatment.

VIII1
(Time allowed is 20 seconds)1
The weekly weather report issued yesterday by the government was as follows:
"With moderate temperatures or mild open weather prevailing, husk­ing of corn made good advance dur­ing the week in eastern and south­ern portions of belt. In the northwest portion, particularly in Iowa and parts of South Dakota, wet soft fields and more or less rain delayed husking considerably; in the former states fields were mostly too wet for husking machines and considerable damage to down corn has resulted from dampness. In the more eastern states and in the south conditions were generally favor­able.
"While some eastern sections of winter-wheat belt reported rather slow growth because of prevailing coolness, the wheat crop generally made good progress during the week in principal producing sections. The soil continued in good to excellent condition in most districts, especially in normally dry more western portions. In Kansas, wheat is nearly all up and much covers the ground in the eastern counties, while further south excellent progress was made in seeding and the early sown is making good advance. In the more northwestern states rains were of great benefit, with the drought relieved in most heretofore dry areas. In Atlantic Coast States, conditions continued generally favorable, with fall-sown grains making good advance."

IX1
(Time allowed is 35 seconds) A REMARKABLE CITY BLOCK
In the midst of New York City stands a building of unique record. It is, first of all, the oldest office building occupying an entire block. When its cornerstone was laid seventy-five years and some months ago it was far uptown. The Legis­lature in 1852 passed a special act authorizing the purchase of this block, described as "the ground bounded by Third Ave,, "Fourth Ave., 9th Street and (on the south) "Stuyvesant St. "and Astor Place," and the holding or conveying the buildings that may be erected thereon. This enabling act was passed for the benefit of the American Bible Society, which from that year has carried on its great work there. The skyscraper had not yet come, for it was only in that year that the first power elevator was installed. Telegraph poles stood on Broadway and street cars were so much disliked by the stage drivers that they purposely drove across the tracks. There were then twenty daily papers, with a combined circulation above 200,000 copies and "a yearly value that must exceed a half million dollars."

No newspaper could then have had a printing plant comparable with that which was housed in the "Bible House." In the seventy-five years since, over 76,000,000 copies of the Scriptures have been printed there. No other printing house has such a polyglot output. Here most of the translating of the Bible into foreign languages has been done, as well as making the American Standard Revised Version of the New Testament. And from this red-brick building, still holding the whole of this site against the tide of tall buildings that have swept by it in this half century of the elevator and the steel beam, the sacred pages of its printing have been carried by train and ship, by wagon and pack ani­mals, by colporteurs and missionaries, to every land on the face of the earth.

Just as a business alone it is one of New York's foremost houses; but when the world-uses to which the vast product is put are considered, it is a business to which New York should be proud to devote a whole block.

X1
(Time allowed is 55 seconds)
With the largest number of employes of any single business con­cern in the city, outnumbering the combined Police, Fire and Street Cleaning departments by 9,000, an army of 41,000 New York Telephone Company employes stands by on twenty-four-hour duty to render constant service to the hundreds of thousands of telephones in the city.
The magnitude of the organization and plant necessary to provide telephone service for New York City is displayed by figures furnished yesterday by J. S. McCulloh, president of the New York Telephone Company, showing that in several impor­tant respects the telephone service for the five boroughs is the largest single enterprise in the metropolis.

"The figures and comparisons which follow," Mr. McCulloh says, "are interesting as suggesting the natural relationship between the telephone and the economic life of the city. As the world's financial and commercial capital, New York City is necessarily the most highly developed telephone centre. Both because of its size and the character of its activities, it presents extraordinary problems of telephone plant extension, operation and administration."

The 41,000 employes of the company in the city are about three-fourths of the total number employed by the company in its entire operating area, the State of New York. The largest group of employes is the operating force, numbering more than 17,600. There are 2,275 men and women, of whom 1,365 are operators and 237 plant men, on regular night duty at present, the latter to make repairs and to test the equipment for the next day's service.

The maintenance of a skilled operating force requires ten traffic employment offices in the city, the selections of between 9,000 and 10,000 young women employes a year and 190 instruc­tors for training work in the traffic department schools.

In the five years up to 1928, gross additions to plant and equipment in New York City have averaged an actual annual cost of $49,238,400 and net additions have averaged $38,933,200 in the same period. The company occupies 6,619,412 square feet of floor space in 139 buildings, of which it owns eighty-seven, specially constructed for telephone purposes.

More than 8,000,000 miles of wire form the city's network of communication, measuring 325 times the distance around the world, or thirty-four times the distance between the earth and the moon. In the first nine months of the present year alone, 386,000 miles of wire were added to this system. Trunk lines and cables pass through 1,149 miles of telephone subway, con­taining 6,474 miles of duct.

The total number of telephones in the city, not including private lines, is 1,678,664, or nearly 9 per cent of the 18,893,000 telephones in the United States.

An average of ninety calls a second, or an average of 7,757,511 a day, originate in the city's telephones. This is nearly 70 per cent more than the average daily traffic of the entire state and more than 10 per cent of the total for the entire country. The actual traffic is greater, because thousands of calls enter daily from outside points in this country and from foreign lands.

The unprecedented financial and business activity of recent months has been reflected in heavily increased telephone traffic throughout the city, particularly in the Wall Street district. The largest traffic handled by a single office, as far as records for the year to date indicate, is the Hanover exchange. In a single day 199,636 calls passed through that office, and in a single hour 32,184.

XI1
(Time allowed is 5 minutes)

ADDRESS BY CHARLES EVANS HUGHES BEFORE THE BAR ASSOCIATION

"When the three Bar Associations of this judicial department appeared before the Appellate Division petitioning for an investigation of abuses, especially of those connected with what is known as 'ambulance chasing/ we began a new chapter in the history of our bar. We sounded the note of cooperation not simply of lawyers, but of associations of lawyers, thus mobilizing the organized forces of the bar for a definite cam­paign. We are awakening to the value of this sort of cooperation. What are its objects? What are its difficulties? What should be its methods?

"We wish the entire bar to have a voice, a commanding voice. We desire the concentration of influence. The object is plain enough when there is corruption, when lawyers betray their clients or are false to their larger trust, perverting the machinery of the courts to make it a vehicle of fraud and a device to ensnare the unfortunate. Then, the outraged sentiment of the entire bar should find expression in investigation, condemnation and redress. It should clean its own house. It should demand of the courts the purging of their administration. The way to proceed has been shown in the recent inquiries. By our united action the latent powers of the court were called into exercise, the expert service of lawyers was volunteered, and the needed measures of reform both in court rules and legislation have been recommended.

"We need something more than this sort of dealing with plain abuses. We desire to improve the tone of the bar, to stiffen its self-respect, to secure a wider appreciation of professional standards. These are not the arbitrary standards of a caste. To commercialize the bar, to introduce the methods of solicita­tion, of mass production, of trading on the opportunities for liti­gation, is inevitably to encourage frauds and perjuries and to destroy the sense of the personal, fiduciary relation which protects both the client and the court. To preserve the sentiment which subordinates gain to the conception of professional duty, which makes reputation for soundness of advice, for integrity in counsel and performance, for loyalty to the client, to the court and to the law, the most highly prized reward in a career of constant toil amid temptations and incitements to laxity—this is the great object which is fostered in our associations and gives zest to our cooperative endeavors.

"With this zeal for the standards of the profession, we are equipped to aid in the never ending task of improving the methods of administration of justice—in the constant pruning to get rid of what is archaic, superfluous and injurious. We need daring and skillful surgery, as well as medicine, and it is a wise conservatism that knows how to employ both.

"The difficulties of cooperation are no less manifest than its needs. The very size of the bar, with its many thousands of members in this great metropolis, is baffling. We have reason to fear that many are coming to the bar who are unfitted to appre­ciate the requirements of professional duty. We have not only the problems of technical legal education, the special equipment for practice, but the greater difficulties with respect to general culture and ethical training. But this is by no means the worst phase. The example of lawyers who succeed, either despite or by help of their misdeeds, causes the diseases of the administration of justice to spread like an epidemic. Well-meaning young practi­tioners are corrupted by their elders who thrive on dishonorable and unprofessional practices.

"Our trouble is not simply in keeping the pestilence out of the temple, but in destroying it inside. How are we to do this, with these vast thousands of practitioners in a community where disre­gard of law is flaunted on every side? I believe that never at any place or never at any time has it been more difficult to maintain the standards of justice than here and now. We are grateful for the contagion of health, that the leaven of wholesome professional opinion is at work, but we must appraise the task.

"Another difficulty is in the preoccupations of the better men at the bar. In this community, when a man is found who is well trained, dependable, faithful and wise, as a good lawyer should be, the demands upon him mount to incredible burdens. The better youngsters in our law offices become crowded with work. The burden bearers of middle life are bowed down by the multi­plying cares of confiding clients. It is a sad spectacle in one sense to see gifted men so absorbed, but it is also inspiring. Despite the large pecuniary returns of success, what a vast amount of unrequited labor is performed by these men at our bar. Once the cause is espoused by a lawyer worthy of the name no effort is too great. The demands of reputation, the sense of obli­gation, of honor, gives the urge. Yet these overworked men are the leaven of the bar. It is to them we must look for every cooperative effort that is worthwhile. It is the preoccupation of lawyers rather than their indifference that constitutes our most formidable obstacle.

"Another difficulty which we encounter when we come to deal with certain questions is diversity of interests. This is conspicuous in the selection of judges. Lawyers have not one voice. They are divided by their political affiliations. They wish good men on the bench, but they are responsive to the appeals of party associates and political expendiency. Then when we come to broad ques­tions of changes in the law and procedure we meet different opinions conscientiously maintained. Lawyers are experts in criticism. They are the natural antagonists of paper reforms. They are conservatives by training and they are always ready to turn their batteries of reason on what they think are ill con­ceived proposals of change.

" There is nothing extraordinary about this. If theologians cannot agree, if scientists dispute, why should lawyers be expected to have a common philosophy or to hold the same views as to reforms in law and administration? When we deal with corrup­tion with crying abuses, we may expect unanimity at least in condemning an offense, if not a particular individual. But when measures of reorganization, of reconstruction of the facilities of justice are proposed, differences in conviction, in political philosophy, in predilections, at once appear and the trained combativeness of lawyers has a fair field.

"It is sometimes said that lawyers largely compose our legisla­tures and therefore they could reform the law and procedure if they would. But lawyers in respect to legislation have not the unity of a single interest. The difficulty increases with the importance of the subject. It is least in minor matters of pro­cedural reform. It is the greatest when we consider constitution­al changes which would alter radically the judicial organization or dispense with historic arrangements which in the past have been deemed so essential to liberty that they have been protected by the great guarantees of the fundamental law.

"In the face of these obstacles, what should be the methods of our cooperation? At once we observe the importance of maintaining our existing associations which have their roots in local sentiment and to some of which are attached the most precious traditions of service and fraternity. We need every bit of help that we can get from these affinities. We cannot accomplish what we seek without the delightful influences of intimate per­sonal fellowship.

"We need the intensive work of small groups. We cannot have the necessary discussion and planning in great meetings, which encourage the expression of extemporized opinions and foster debate rather than a common effort to find solutions. The committees of our associations furnish this opportunity. I have spoken of the preoccupations of the busy men of the bar. Let me now pay the tribute of affection and admiration to the hundreds of these men who add to their enormous burden of professional work the labors of committees which deal expertly with a great variety of subjects, sifting proposals, earnestly striving to find the better ways of administration in their special lines. In the Associations of the Bar of the City of New York we have nearly 600 at work in these committees.

"Of course some of these committees demand only occasional endeavors. They are established to meet emergencies. With others there is the pressure of unceasing demands, as, for example, in the grievance committee, in the committee on the amendment of the law, in committees dealing with particular courts and in special committees addressing themselves to various urgent problems. This intensive work, culminating in well-considered reports, prepares the way for informing the bar, mobilizing its sentiment and neutralizing such opposition as might otherwise come from mere ignorance or prejudice.

"This is the work that can be done in our separate organiza­tions. But when abuses demand the emphatic protest and remedial action of the bar as a whole or opinions on proposed improvements have crystalized so that we can expect them to be promoted by the profession, we need the cooperation of all our associations to speak with the authority of the entire bar. How shall we achieve this?

"We had not long ago a meeting of the presidents of our bar associations in this city at which the subject was discussed. We decided to recommend the organization of a joint committee, a permanent committee of representatives of the associations, to which could be at once referred any matter in which cooperation was desired. Not that such a committee would usurp authority and assume to act for their associations without their consent but that it would provide a ready instrumentality for contract, for exchanges of views and for making speedy arrangements in order to secure the necessary authority for united action. Such a loose, flexible agency is much better than an attempt at this time to obtain a formal, rigid organization. It will utilize, with­out offense or injury to any, the means of cooperation at our command. It will help all and affront none. This marks a new development of the greatest promise.

"We need more than the cooperation of lawyers. We must have the cooperation of the bench. The judges should know as well as the lawyers, if not better, not only where the need of improvements lies, but the best means of securing it. Some­times a very small change will produce a great result. Observe, for example, what has been accomplished through the work of the Special Calendar Committee under the auspices of the Appellate Division in this district and with the aid of that great leader in our cooperative efforts and in improving the administration of justice, the presiding justice of this department, Victor J. Dowl-ing. In that committee, judges and lawyers have focused their wisdom and great experience on the evils of congested calendars. I think that this has been the most useful effort of our day. Then, we have the cooperation both in the first and second departments of the bench and the bar in the ambulance chasing inquiries and in the highly important services of Justices Wasservogel and Faber in conducting these inquiries. There is no important re­form that cannot be had in the administration of justice if the bench and the bar cooperate to obtain it.

" We also need the cooperation of the community. I shall not waste time on the repute of lawyers. They never have been popular. But while they are, in general, the object of much public objurgation, they are in particular the trusted advisers, the counselors and fiduciaries of the community upon whose expert judgment and trained talent everyone in trouble calls. Let us not forget that law itself is the vital breath of democracy. Despotism exercises an uncontrolled will. In democracy the power of government is subdued to the principles which have general acceptance, and these principles are embodied in what we call the law.

It is the only escape from an unbridled official discretion which is the essence of tyranny. Lawyers should be the expert instruments of democracy and the more complicated its mechanisms, the more elaborate the laws which are the product of democracy's legislative workshops, the more necessary is the service of those who devote their lives to the study and interpretation of the laws.

"But no one should forget that while improvement in the administration of justice is the special responsibility of the bar, because of its knowledge and experience, that improvement is sought for the benefit of the community and not for the benefit of lawyers. High-minded lawyers indeed are disheartened and disgusted by favoritisms, delays and abuses. They feel humili­ated by perversions of justice. But lawyers are representatives. The real sufferers from defective administration are the clients— the community itself. Lawyers have everything to give to the community and nothing to fear from its action. If the commun­ity, apart from the lawyers, could intelligently reform the admin­istration of justice, the lawyers would have no reason to complain. Unintelligent efforts at improvement would only make matters worse and, even then, the lawyers would suffer the least. They would have even more work to do in the endeavoring to disen­tangle justice.

"The true point of view is that we are all bound together in society. One member, a trade or profession, cannot say to another member, 'I have no need of thee.' Lawyers should recognize their responsibility not because of any selfish interest at stake, but because they have the knowledge, the experience and the skill which are needed. They have the obligations of their equipment. They should realize that their highest privilege is that of the trained servants of democracy. But let all join in the work. If it is a matter of purging the profession of unworthy members, let the bar attend to it. If it is a question of improving the methods of administration, let the bar aspire not to impose its will on the community, but to be the guide, philosopher and friend of all the people in a common effort for the common good.

"We may congratulate ourselves on what has been achieved. Even with respect to our calendars, there has been a notable improvement. The Supreme Court of the United States, the Court of Appeals of this state, the Appellate Divisions, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in this circuit, are up to their work and deal with cases practically as soon as they are ready for submission. The ambulance chasing investigation and the recommendations of the special calendar committee have resulted in reducing our trial calendars in considerable measure.

"The great work of legal aid to those who have meritorious cases or defenses but are without means, is better organized and supported through our Legal Aid Society than ever before. How important that work is—the helping hand of the bar to our neighbor who needs expert assistance.

" But this is only a beginning. Most serious delays exist in our courts of first instance, and in our lower courts. The need of improvements is obvious. There are other systems of solicitation besides ambulance chasing which should be broken up. Our procedure, especially criminal procedure, has too many archaic survivals. In several instances, what was once a guaranty of liberty is now a fetter of justice. The system of jury trials for many cases is dilatory and expensive, and in our great cities mocks the tradition that supports it.

" We should be active and persistent, but not impatient. It is not to be assumed that all needed reforms can be accomplished in our day. Even if we could achieve what we desire, the old conflict of good and evil would remain, and perhaps our very achievements would produce new difficulties. I am often reminded of the observation of Santayana that in any specific reform we may succeed but half the time, and in that measure of success we may sow the 'seeds of newer and higher evils to keep the edge of virtue clean.' But we have not to do with such later evils. The absolute within us demands that we deal with these evils now existing and within our ken. Who is my neighbor? The lawyer need not pause for a reply. His first charge, his lasting obligation, concerns the administration of justice, and his keenest satisfaction should be found in the fellowship and cooper­ation of those devoted to the task of safeguarding and improving it."

XII
HINTS TOWARDS AN ESSAY ON CONVERSATION
By Jonathan Swift (Time allowed is five minutes)
I have observed few obvious subjects to have been so seldom, or, at least, so slightly handled as this; and, indeed, I know few so difficult to be treated as it ought, nor yet upon which there seemeth so much to be said.
Most things, pursued by men for the happiness of public or private life, our wit or folly have so refined, that they seldom subsist but in idea; a true friend, a good marriage, a perfect form of government, with some others require so many ingredients, so good in their several kinds, and so much niceness in mixing them, that for some thousands of years men have despaired of reducing their schemes to perfection. But, in conversation, it is, or might be otherwise; for here we are only to avoid a multitude of errors, which, although a matter of some difficulty, may be in every man's power, for want of which it remaineth as mere an idea as the other. Therefore it seemeth to me, that the truest way to under­stand conversation, is to know the faults and errors to which it is subject, and from thence every man to form maxims to himself whereby it may be regulated, because it requireth few talents to which most men are not born, or at least may not acquire without any great genius or study. For nature hath left every man a capacity of being agreeable, though not of shining in company; and there are an hundred men sufficiently qualified for both, who, be a very few faults, that they might correct in half an hour, are not so much as tolerable.

I was prompted to write my thoughts upon this subject by mere indignation, to reflect that so useful and innocent a pleasure, so fitted for every period and condition of life, and so much in all men's power, should be so much neglected and abused.

And in this discourse it will be necessary to note those errors that are obvious, as well as others which are seldomer observed, since there are few so obvious, or acknowledged, into which most men, some time or other, are not apt to run.

For instance: Nothing is more generally exploded than the folly of talking too much; yet I rarely remember to have seen five people together, where some one among them hath not been pre­dominant in that kind, to the great constraint and disgust of all the rest. But among such as deal in multitudes of words, none are comparable to the sober deliberate talker, who proceedeth with much thought and caution, maketh his preface, brancheth out into several digressions, findeth a hint that putteth him in mind of another story, which he promiseth to tell you when this is done; cometh back regularly to his subject, cannot readily call to mind some person's name, holding his head, complaineth of his memory; the whole company all this while in suspense; at length says, it is no matter, and so goes on. And, to crown the business, it perhaps proveth at last a story the company hath heard fifty times before; or, at best, some insipid adventure of the relater.

Another general fault in conversation is, that of those who affect to talk of themselves: Some, without any ceremony, will run over the history of their lives; will relate the annals of their diseases, with the several symptoms and circumstances of them; will enumerate the hardships and injustice they have suffered in court, in parliament, in love, or in law. Others are more dexter­ous, and with great art will lie on the watch to hook in their own praise: They will call a witness to remember they always foretold what would happen in such a case, but none would believe them; they advised such a man from the beginning, and told him the consequences, just as they happened; but he would have his own way. Others make a vanity of telling their faults; they are the strangest men in the world; they cannot dissemble; they own it is a folly; they have lost abundance of advantages by it; but, if you would give them the world, they cannot help it; there is something in their nature that abhors insincerity and constraint; with many other insufferable topics of the same altitude.

Of such mighty importance every man is to himself, and ready to think he is so to others; without once making this easy and obvious reflection, that his affairs can have no more weight with other men, than theirs have with him; and how little that is, he is sensible enough.

Where company hath met, I often have observed two persons discover, by some accident, that they were bred together at the same school or university, after which the rest are condemned to silence, and to listen while these two are refreshing each other's memory with the arch tricks and passages of themselves and their comrades.

I know a great officer of the army, who will sit for some time with a supercilious and impatient silence, full of anger and contempt for those who are talking; at length of a sudden demand audience, decide the matter in a short dogmatical way; then with­draw within himself again, and vouchsafe to talk no more, until his spirits circulate again to the same point.

There are some faults in conversation, which none are so sub­ject to as the men of wit, nor ever so much as when they are with each other. If they have opened their mouths, without endeav­ouring to say a witty thing, they think it is so many words lost: It is a torment to the hearers, as much as to themselves, to see them upon the rack for invention, and in perpetual constraint, with so little success. They must do something extraordinary, in order to acquit themselves, and answer their character, else the standers-by may be disappointed and be apt to think them only like the rest of mortals. I have known two men of wit industriously brought together, in order to entertain the com­pany, where they have made a very ridiculous figure, and pro­vided all the mirth at their own expense.

I know a man of wit, who is never easy but where he can be allowed to dictate and preside: he neither expecteth to be informed or entertained, but to display his own talents. His business is to be good company, and not good conversation; and therefore, he chooseth to frequent those who are content to listen, and profess themselves his admirers. And indeed, the worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life, was that at Will's coffeehouse, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble; that is to say, five or six men, who had writ plays, or at least prologues, or had share in a miscellany, came thither, and entertained one another with their trifling composures, in so important an air, as if they had been the noblest efforts of human nature, or that the fate of kingdoms depended on them; and they were usually attended with an humble audience of young students from the inns of court, or the universities, who, at due distance, listened to these oracles, and returned home with great contempt for their law and philosophy, their heads filled with trash, under the name of politeness, criticism and belles lettres.

By these means the poets, for many years past, were all overrun with pedantry. For, as I take it, the word is not properly used; because pedantry is the too frequent or unseasonable obtruding our own knowledge in common discourse, and placing too great a value upon it; by which definition, men of the court or the army may be as guilty of pedantry as a philosopher or a divine; and, it is the same vice in women, when they are over copious upon the subject of their petticoats, or their fans, or their china. For which reason, although it be a piece of prudence, as well as good manners, to put men upon talking on subjects they are best versed in, yet that is a liberty a wise man could hardly take; because, beside the imputation of pedantry, it is what he would never improve by.

There are two faults in conversation, which appear very different, yet arise from the same root, and are equally blameable; I mean, an impatience to interrupt others, and the uneasiness of being interrupted ourselves; which whoever will consider, cannot easily run into either of those two errors; because when any man speaketh in company, it is to be supposed he doth it for his hearers' sake, and not his own; so that common discretion will teach us not to force their attention, if they are not willing to lend it; nor on the other side, to interrupt him who is in possession, because that is in the grossest manner to give the preference to our own good sense.

There are some people, whose good manners will not suffer them to interrupt you; but, what is almost as bad, will discover abun­dance of impatience, and lie upon the watch until you have done, because they have started something in their own thoughts which they long to be delivered of. Meantime, they are so far from regarding what passes, that their imaginations are wholly turned upon what they have in reserve, for fear it should slip out of their memory; and thus they confine their invention, which might otherwise range over a hundred things full as good, and that might be much more naturally introduced.

There is a sort of rude familiarity, which some people, by practising among their intimates, have introduced into their general conversation, and would have it pass for innocent freedom or humour, which is a dangerous experiment in our northern climate, where all the little decorum and politeness we have are purely forced by art, and are so ready to lapse into barbarity. This, among the Romans, was the raillery of slaves, of which we have many instances in Plautus. It seemeth to have been intro­duced among us by Cromwell, who, by preferring the scum of the people, made it a court entertainment, of which I have heard many particulars; and, considering all things were turned upside down, it was reasonable and judicious. Although it was a piece of policy found out to ridicule a point of honour in the other -extreme, when the smallest word misplaced among gentlemen ended in a duel.

There are some men excellent at telling a story, and provided with a plentiful stock of them, which they can draw out upon occasion in all companies; and, considering how low conversation runs now among us, it is not altogether a contemptible talent; however, it is subject to two unavoidable defects; frequent repeti­tion, and being soon exhausted; so that whoever valueth this gift in himself, hath need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company, that he may not discover the weakness of his fund; for those who are thus endowed, have seldom any other revenue, but live upon the main stock.

Great speakers in public, are seldom agreeable in private con­versation, whether their faculty be natural, or acquired by prac­tice, and often venturing. Natural elocution, although it may seem a paradox, usually springeth from a barrenness of invention and of words, by which men who have only one stock of notions upon every subject, and one set of phrases to express them in, they swim upon the superfices, and offer themselves on every occasion; therefore, men of much learning, and who know the compass of a language, are generally the worst talkers on a sudden, until much practice hath inured and emboldened them, because they are confounded with plenty of matter, variety of notions, and of words, which they cannot readily choose, but are perplexed and entangled by too great a choice; which is no dis­advantage in private conversation; where, on the other side, the talent of haranguing is, of all others, most insupportable.

Nothing hath spoiled men more for conversation, than the character of being wits, to support which, they never fail of encouraging a number of followers and admirers, who list them­selves in their service, wherein they find their accounts on both sides, by pleasing their mutual vanity. This hath given the former such an air of superiority, and made the latter so pragmati­cal, that neither of them are well to be endured. I say nothing here of the itch of dispute and contradiction, telling of lies, or of those who are troubled with the disease called the wandering of the thoughts, that they are never present in mind at what passeth in discourse, is as unfit for conversation as a madman in Bedlam.

I think I have gone over most of the errors in conversation, that have fallen under my notice or memory, except some that are merely personal, and others too gross to need exploding; such as lewd or profane talk; but I pretend only to treat the errors of conversation in general, and not the several subjects of discourse, which would be infinite. Thus we see how human nature is most debased, by the abuse of that faculty, which is held the great distinction between men and brutes; and how little advant­age we make of that which might be the greatest, the most lasting, and the most innocent, as well as useful pleasure of life. In default of which, we are forced to take up with those poor amuse­ments of dress and visiting, or the more pernicious ones of play, drink, and vicious amours, whereby the nobility and gentry of both sexes are entirely corrupted both in body and mind, and have lost all notions of love, honour, friendship, generosity; which, under the name of fopperies, have been for some time laughed out of doors.

This degeneracy of conversation, with the pernicious conse­quences thereof upon our humours and dispositions, hath been owing, among other causes, to the custom arisen, for sometime past, of excluding women from any share in our society, further than in parties at play, or dancing, or in the pursuit of an amour. I take the highest period of politeness in England (and it is of the same date in France) to have been the peaceable part of King Charles the First's reign; and from what we read of those times, as well as from the accounts I have formerly met with from some who lived in that court, the methods then used for raising and cultivating conversation, were altogether different from ours. Several ladies, whom, we find celebrated by the poets of that age, had assemblies at their houses, where persons of the best under­standing and of both sexes, met to pass the evenings in discoursing upon whatever agreeable subjects were occasionally started; and although we are apt to ridicule the sublime platonic notions they had, or personated in love and friendship, I conceive their refine­ments were grounded upon reason, and that a little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into every­thing that is sordid, vicious and low. If there were no other use in the conversation of ladies, it is sufficient that it would lay a restraint upon those odious topics of immodesty and indencencies, into which the rudeness of our northern genius is so apt to fall. And, therefore, it is observable in those sprightly gentlemen about the town, who are so very dexterous at entertaining a vizard mask in the park or the playhouse, that, in the company of ladies of virtue and honour, they are silent and disconcerted, and out of their element.

There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit them­selves and entertain their company with relating of facts of no con­sequence, nor at all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day; and this I have observed more frequently among the Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not to omit the minutest circumstances of time or place; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent and gesture, peculiar to that country, would be hardly tolerable. It is not a fault in company to talk much; but to continue it long is certainly one; for, if the majority of those who are got together be naturally silent or cautious, the conversation will flag, unless it be often renewed by one among them, who can start new subjects, pro­vided he doth not dwell upon them, but leaveth room for answers and replies.

XIII (Time allowed is 32 seconds)
An exchange for the sale of real estate securities exclusively is soon to be established by the Real Estate Board of New York, according to an announcement by the board yesterday. The proposed bureau will be modeled after the idea of the New York Stock Exchange. It will function along the lines of the Stock and Curb Exchanges and will occupy the same relative position in real estate finance as those institutions do in the financing of industrial, commercial transportation and public utility enter­prises. Plans for the project were announced recently by Peter Grimm, President of the Real Estate Board.
The statement of the board yesterday said, in part:

"The ultimate benefits, realty experts say, would not be con­fined to the facilitation of financing methods, but would extend to every phase of the business and would stimulate public interest in real estate as a whole by placing the flotation of its stock and bond issues on a stable and dependable basis. By providing a centralized and well regulated market for such stocks and bonds, it is argued, the new mart would make the securities more liquid and would thus encourage wider public participation in large building development and real estate enterprises.

"One phase of the exchange plan of outstanding significance is the protection that it affords the investor, for no issue of bonds or stocks will be offered on the floor until it has been thoroughly investigated and approved by the committees appointed for that purpose. In the case of bond issues in building projects, it is a condition of acceptance for listing that the preliminary appraisal must be made by the Real Estate Board's Appraisal Committee composed of recognized experts in the field of real estate valuation. On this score alone, it is intimated, the plan should receive the hearty endorsement and cooperation of the State's legal officials. Attorney General Albert Ottinger has long sought to devise methods for safeguard­ing the investing public against the promoters of flimsy and ill-conceived real estate ventures, and it is quite logical to assume that he will favor a scheme that should go far toward accomplish­ing the purposes of a blue sky law.

"The purchase of seats on the Exchange is limited to members of the Real Estate Board of New York in good standing. Mem­bership is, for the present, limited to 250, but this may be extended by the Exchange's Board of Governors with the approval of the members. The price of the seats, or the initiation fee as it is termed, is $1,000.

"Real estate securities of all types issued in any part of the country may be listed on the Exchange, provided they conform to the high standards devised to test their soundness and pass the rigid scrutiny of the committee or committees entrusted with the duties of investigation. By no means one of the least impor­tant results from this broad field of activity will be the creation of a system of daily quotations establishing the current market price of sound securities, a thing which the real estate stock and bond market has long needed."

XIV
(Time allowed is 19 seconds)
Special to The New York Times.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 18.—Ameri­can exports of finished manufactures during the fiscal year ending June 30 had a total value of $2,061,000,000, an increase of 4 per cent, over the previ­ous year and 70 per cent, over the fiscal year 1922, Dr. Julius Klein, Director of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, declared in his annual report, made public today by the Commerce Department.

From one-seventh to one-eighth of the total farm production was marketed abroad, he said, representing the output of a million and a quarter persons while 8 or 9 per cent, of the output of factories is exported, repre­senting the production of not far from a million industrial workers.

Workers in Export Production.

Dr. Klein gave the following sum­mary of the workers employed in the more important lines of export trade, not including clerks and other salaried workers:
75,000 workers to produce machinery.
47,000 to turn out automobiles.
37,000 to prepare lumber and planing mill products.
31,000 to weave cotton goods.
26,000 to mine coal.
24,000 to manufacture iron and steel.
12,000 in petroleum refineries and many others in producing crude oil for export.
10,000 to compound chemical products.
8,000 in canning and preserving.
8,000 in rubber goods factories.
7,000 in copper smelters and many more in the mines.
6,000 in tanneries.
5,500 in knitting mills.
5,500 in tool and cutlery works.

Key to Domestic Prosperity.

"Should our foreign commerce sud­denly be cut off," Dr. Klein added, "it would mean not merely displacement of a great army of workers, with its rebound on their families and depend­ents, but such a shock to industry, such a severe depression, as would throw out of employment also hundreds of thou­sands of those who are producing for purely domestic consumption."

Dr. Klein said that the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce had assisted directly in the forward march of export trade, and that American con­cerns were showing increased interest.

During the fiscal year ending June 30 sales and savings of $15,000,000 were reported by 800 exporters as traceable to the bureau's aids. On 3,000,000 occasions, or an average of 10,000 for each business day, the bureau rendered some kind of specific service.

 XV (Time allowed is 34 seconds)
Special to The New York Times.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 25.—The ac­tual strength of the active army of the United States was 134,505 on June 30, 1928, exclusive of nurses, contract surgeons and West Point cadets, Major Gen. Lutz Wahl, the Adjutant General, stated in his an­nual report to the Secretary of War, made public today. There were 699 army nurses, 33 contract surgeons and 878 cadets, making a total of 136,115 in the military service.
By classes of personnel the army's strength was distributed as follows:
COMMISSIONED OFFICERS.
Regular Army (active list)      11,872
Philippine Scouts (active Hst)            94
Retired Regular Army, on active duty.. 133 Retired Philippine Scouts, on active
duty............................. 13
Total Commissioned Officers            12,112
WARRANT OFFICERS.
Regular Army (active list)      1,208
ENLISTED MEN.
Regular Army (active list)      114,757
Philippine Scouts (active list) 6,400
Retired Regular Army, on active duty 28
Total enlisted men....... 121,185

Of the 134,505 officers and men 96,366 were serving in the continen­tal United States, 14,083 in Hawaii, 8,605 in the Canal Zone, 310 in Alaska, 1,282 in Porto Rico, 11,343 in the Philippine Islands, including 6,486 of­ficers and enlisted men of the Philip­pine Scouts; 979 in China, 7 in Eu­rope attached to the Graves Regis­tration Service, and 1,530 were either en route from one country to another, on leave of absence or serving as mil­itary attaches in foreign countries.

Sources of Officer Personnel.

Less than one-third of the 11,966 of­ficers in the commissioned personnel of the regular army and Philippine Scouts were West Point graduates.

Almost as many officers came           from
civil life as from West Point.  The
sources of appointment were given as follows:
Civil life 3,428
Graduate, Military Academy             3,544
Enlisted man, Regular Army              1,119
Officer, National Army                     253
Enlisted man, National Army             275
Officer, Reserve Corps                     2,184
Enlisted man, Reserve Corps                        205
Enlisted man, National Guard                        271
Volunteer officer                   43
Volunteer, enlisted man                     16
Officer, National Guard                    331
Warrant officer pay clerk, army field clerk, field clerk of Quartermaster
Corps..    48
Contract surgeon or veterinarian                   144
Retired officer, restored to active list. .          16
Retired enlisted man             1
Public Health Service                        1
Revenue Cutter Service                    1
Coast and Geodetic Survey              2
Flying cadet              68
Officer, Philippine scouts                  16
Total.... 11.966

The 3,428 officers appointed from civil life included, in addition to those who had no previous military service, men who have had service during the war with Spain, the World War or in the regular army, but who had returned to civil life.

During the fiscal year 162 commis­sioned officers were retired, 83 resigned, 14 were discharged, 2 were dropped as absent without leave, 5 were dismissed, 70 died and 33 retired officers previously assigned to active duty were relieved.
Results of Selective Recruiting.

"Intelligence tests introduced experi­mentally in several corps areas last year were put into general operation throughout the recruiting service begin­ning with the fiscal year ended June 30, 1928," said General Wahl, "and all new applicants for enlistment were subjected to these tests, which are designed primarily to aid in the elimi­nation of undesirable applicants before their enlistment.

"As a result of the precautions taken, the percentage of desertions during the year again showed a decrease, having been 5.81 per cent, as compared with 6.07 per cent for the previous fiscal year.

"The losses from all causes among enlisted men during the year aggre­gated 58,914, by far the greater num­ber having been discharged because of expiration of service."

The activities of the recruiting ser­vice were rewarded by the enlistment and re-enlistment of 56,748 men, including 1,148 for the Philippine Scouts. Of the 55,600 exclusive of the Philippine Scouts, General Wahl said, 52,097, or 93.7 per cent, were native-born Americans; 53,877 were white, including 476 Porto Ricans; 1,444 colored and 279 were of other races.

The aggregate strength of the Reserve Corps at the end of the fiscal year was 114,824, including 9,765 officers, who held commissions in both the National Guard and the Reserve Corps. This was a net increase of 4,810 during the fiscal year.

NOTE TO THE READER

Up to this point you have been increasing your skimming rate from 10 words per second in the first exercises to 20 in the last. You have found 20 words per second an almost impossible rate of skimming.

You ought now to be able to skim the following article moderately well at the rate of 10 words per second. Try to finish it in 12 minutes.
After you have skimmed this last long article, write or dictate the general content as you recall it.

XVI1
The skeptical and well informed reader who has been following these investigations must long ago have raised his voice in protest against one glaring oversight in my survey.
"You have ignored the farmer! You consider all the pro­fessions, business, manufacturing and scientific research," he is saying. "But you never seek openings for superior minds in agriculture. Isn't this rather absurd? Farming, if done correctly, calls for a higher order of all-around ability. For centuries untold it occupied the best minds. Why not today?"

I admit that I have left the farmer out of the reckoning thus far. But I have done so for a peculiar reason, which must now be declared. My approach to the problem of the superior man and his future is sternly realistic. I try to observe and deal with things as they are, first of all; then with things as they seem likely to become soon; and finally with things as we may be able to shape them to suit our own sweet wills. I am not even remotely interested in ideals, as the genuine idealists think of them. So swiftly moves the world of men and affairs that it is folly to strive to look ahead more than a few decades—and greater folly still to plan ahead for more than a few years. Twenty months from this moment, some Bessarabian agrono­mist may hit upon the long sought method of breeding soil bacteria in quantity; and before 1930, the world's food supply will have become inexhaustible and cheaper than the very dirt from which it springs. But why dally over dreams of such miracles? Why not study and plan today strictly in the light of realities as they now are ? Why not compute probabilities on the firm basis of certainties?

In this spirit I look at farming and the farmer. And I see no hope for our Best Minds in agriculture. That is to say, I see no hope for hundreds of thousands of superior people seeking better careers on farms than they now find in cities. Relative to our total population there are too many superior people already engaged in agriculture, trying to make money at it. Thousands of them must leave their acres, in order to find the satisfaction they seek in life. Why? The answer is rather complicated. It cannot be otherwise. For the world situation in agriculture is a maze through which few economists and still fewer social scientists can thread their way. To grasp it thor­oughly, one must have lived on farms and visited many other farms in widely differing parts of the world.

Behind all the flurries in crop prices, behind all droughts, floods, forest fires, insect plagues, partisan politics, stock swindles, and other disasters that strike the farmers now and then, there is to be found a fundamental state of affairs which has driven and will continue to drive from the farms all persons of superior intelligence except the tiny minority who enjoy farm life and do not look to it for their chief income. This state of affairs is one which, prior to the twentieth century, drove the world's farmers steadily downward into the coolie class. And now, with the advent of super-machinery and super-organization, it will drive 95 per cent of all farmers still faster into cooliedom, while it will slowly lift the remaining 5 per cent into the exalted position of farm corporation stockholders, owners, and managers.

First lay firm hold of a few elemental facts about the farmer, facts which all economists and other observers agree upon. Most important of all is the fact that the American farmer is neither a capitalist nor a laborer in the true economic sense. That is to say, his business—if we can call it such without laughing—is not run as any modern business man runs his own; nor is his labor rewarded on the same basis and principle as the industrial worker's is. The farmer is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl.

As business men figure, the farmer makes no profit whatsoever. Rather does he incur every year an appalling loss. A sound business must pay a normal rate of interest on all its capital and must pay wages to all who work for it. Only after these and other expenses have been met, is there anything left for true profit. Now, so far as anybody knows, there isn't a farmer in North America who can run his acres on this basis and come out even at the year's end; and if there are a few, the odds are a hundred to one that they could not show a true profit on a ten-year average.

The recent analysis made by the National Industrial Con­ference Board reveals that, since 1920, the American farmer has been averaging only 4 per cent return on his capital investment. His return on operation is only 2 per cent. That is, if he rents a farm and spends money on crops, he gets only this microscopic reward. What the Conference Board does not mention is that the farm operator makes this 2 per cent only by taking out not a cent for salary for himself, as operator. What a dolt he is to accept this basis of remuneration! What a fool to stick at such unprofitable toil!

If the American farmer paid himself for his own services no more than the unskilled laborer in the city receives, he would not have a cent left to pay interest on his capital investment or to employ other help or to do anything else. As a business man he is a total failure from the outset. And as a laborer he is lower than the meanest ditch digger and garbage collector on a city wage. Measured by modern economics, he is a standing joke. The only wonder is that he continues to stand.

His business, if we may call it that ironically, is more hazardous than most others. Yet he never takes out of it any high profit that rewards him for his great risks. And, as I shall later show in some detail, the only gain he has ever made is the little represented by the increased value of his land.

In 1923, the total wages of the 8,778,950 workers in all American factories amounted to $11,009,298,000.

This sum almost precisely equals that which American farmers lose every year by growing and selling crops, if we reckon costs and profits as manufacturers and other business men do.

Every year American corporations distribute dividends amounting to something between two and three billion dollars.

Every year farm land crops are damaged to this same extent— two to three billion dollars—by soil erosion, removal of soil fertility, and insect pests.

If farmers were in a position to sell their products on the same basis with manufacturers in other lines, and if they were likewise able to make selling prices take proper care of deprecia­tion of their productive property, basic living costs would rise enormously in all cities; and the industrial system as now devel­oped in Europe and America would be impossible. Instead of our country consisting, as it now does, of three major classes, rural coolies, urban workers at or just above the subsistence level, and a very prosperous upper economic class of about 2,000,000 people, we should have virtually only one class of moderately prosperous citizens in town and country, the very rich class then being so small in numbers as to be economically negligible.

The more intelligent men and women all over the world are deserting farms. This appears in the dwindling production of basic crops. The farmers of the world are producing today less than they did before the World War.

Here are the most significant figures:
Crop 1913                                          19271
Wheat                             4,087,000,000 bu.            3,390,784,000 bu.
Corn                               3,743,000,000 bu.            3,266,150,000 bu.
Oats                               4,798,500,000 bu.            3,440,075,000 bu.
Rye                                 1,893,000,000 bu.            883,191,000 bu.
Barley                             1,779,000,000 bu.            1,188,165,000 bu.
Cotton                              26,259,000 bales            15,100,100 bales
Swine                           2,881,000,000 head            2,837,000,000 head (1924)

Only three major crops have not dwindled thus. They are potatoes, wool, and tobacco. The last is sinister, when we consider that it is one of the worst wasters of soil fertility in the world.

To grasp the full meaning of these figures, you must understand that, in spite of the huge losses caused by the World War and the influenza epidemic, the population of the world in 1927 greatly exceeded that of 1913. Also keep before you the fact that European agriculture had, in 1927, recovered from the after­effects of the war and was on a new normal level.

The entire world now stands on the threshold of an Agrarian Revolution which careful analysis reveals to be the last and greatest phase of the Industrial Revolution which came to its first focus in the late eighteenth century. Little by little the methods of our money and profit economy are undermining the old and hopelessly barbaric type of agriculture which has pre­vailed all over the world since man first hit upon the most deeply revolutionary scheme in his entire career, tilling the soil. For centuries uncounted, farming has been a way of life, not a busi­ness in the modern sense. Men lived in the country, raised their own food, grew their own wool for clothing dug holes in the ground to get cool, clean water, and chopped down ancient trees for firewood and house timbers. Their wives milked cows and goats, churned, washed dishes, raised ten or twelve children, and drudged along dully till they dropped dead over the kitchen sinks. It was just Life.

Did these primitive rustics ever figure as the smallest town retailer or shop owner must? Did they reckon up their invested capital and then set down interest charges for it as an item to be met out of sales? Did they carefully compute depreciation of soils through erosion and the removal of fertility in crops? Did they ever pay themselves, their wives and their grown children wages as city business men do when they employ their families? The very questions answer themselves. We have about 6,500,-000 farms in the country today; of these, not 5,000 are or could be run as a city store, factory, mill, or other enterprise must be, to keep out of bankruptcy.

From the point of view of anybody who thinks in terms of modern economics, all farming by individual owners and operators on a few hundred acres or less is simply preposterous. Too many managers relative to the number of workers! Think of it! We have only 200,000 manufacturing establishments, of which thou­sands are under central office management; but we have 6,500,000 separately operated farms. Now if there is anything sure in vocational tests, it is the very small percentage of competent managers that can be found throughout our adult population. If we may judge by several broad samplings recently made, not more than three skilled laborers out of every hundred have any ambition to become foremen or superintendents; they prefer their routine work under orders, they dislike giving orders and running other people. And their dislike is generally based on a sound instinct which quietly tells them that they are not competent managers. It is very safe to assume that not more than one man in every hundred is sufficiently gifted as an executive to run any enterprise easily and well. This suggests that not more than 65,000 American farmers are able to run their estates so as to make money. And most of these are not making anything like the money they ought to, because they are in active competi­tion against 6,435,000 small farmers who run their business so poorly that they gladly sell crops at a loss and are content to go on working without getting even so much as the wages of a city ditch digger.

A business man cannot compete against a coolie. This is the root of the Agrarian Revolution in our own country. It is the primary cause of all the agitation behind the Farm Bloc. And it must continue to be that until we have settled, once and for all time, the burning issue: shall we turn American agriculture into a sound business or into ancient peasantry? There is no third course. And there can be no lasting compromise. Just as our nation, in the day before the Civil War, could not exist half slave and half free, so now we cannot exist half business and half peasant. If we do not face this squarely, we shall soon be facing a social revolution which, in its way, may prove almost as disastrous as the Civil War.

Now how does this bear on our immediate problem? Well, during the next twenty or thirty years, the Agrarian Revolution will grow steadily worse, if not from the social then at least from the business point of view. There will be no fresh oppor­tunities for anybody, dull or clever, in American agriculture— unless it be the process server and the sheriff. After that, what? Things will settle down in either one of the two ways I have named. We may put all agriculture on the basis of Old World peasantry, or we may put it all on a business basis.

If we revert to peasantry, the outcome will be essentially as in England today. There about nine out of every ten acres of farm land are owned by a few immensely rich landlords and rented out to small peasants who toil fourteen or fifteen hours a day, live as no city dweller would consent to live, and slowly sink to lower and lower intelligence levels, as several recent English surveys have shown. School children in the rural sections of Yorkshire and Northumberland score much more poorly than do city and suburban children. (The one exception is the very remote rural school, from which better types have not been drawn off to city work.) What chance is there in such a system of agriculture for our Best Minds? None whatsoever!

Suppose, on the other hand, that our industrialists, bankers, social workers, and politicians join hands in lifting American agriculture out of its present degradation into a sound economic position.

It is more than possible that, as the Agrarian Revolution proceeds, intelligent men will come to the belief that food must be treated as a public utility just as water, gas, electricity, and transportation now are. Then the regulation of food production and food distribution will begin on a scale undreamed of today even by the wildest radicals in the Farm Bloc. Probably it will begin with some kind of regional franchises, such as a contract between a city and some large corporation for the annual food supply on a price basis which guarantees to the corporation a fair net profit, and to the citizens a sliding scale of standardized food prices fitted nicely to production and distribution costs.

At one stroke, such a move would do away with a horde of nuisances. The present preposterous methods of food marketing would vanish over night. Food would be delivered as gas now is, by the corporation itself under strict contract with penalty clauses which would protect each householder. Each consumer would pay strictly for what he used and for no more; and the quality and quantity of his purchases would be absolutely guaranteed. I ven­ture to assert that the city which is first to introduce such a sys­tem will instantly gain a lead over rival communities in the way of attracting superior working-men and factories. This will force other cities to follow suit. And the upshot of it all will be the rapid multiplication of food service corporations analogous to the United Fruit Company on the production side and to Childs' Restaurants on the distribution side. Then the small farmer will disappear like snow under sudden sun.

It seems more than reasonable that the trend toward large corporation farming may come, not directly but rather by way of experiments in regional cooperation. Individual small farmers, urged on by bitter necessity, may band together for self-help; and, having so banded, they will slowly learn that central man­agement is vastly more efficient than simple cooperation. They will also learn, though perhaps by trial and error, that some of their number manage affairs far better than others, and that such superior managers can earn more for all concerned than the coöperators can earn individually. From this stage of enlightenment it will be an easy journey into the fair land of corporation farming. Instead of five hundred barns scattered all over a county, there will be five immense structures equipped with all the conveniences and fire-protection equipment. Instead of there being five hundred houses there will be perhaps twenty fine ones on the acreage, strategically located, while the stock­holders who do not work on the property live in near-by towns— or even in New York or Paris, for that matter. Instead of five overworked and underpaid country doctors, plodding the back roads in the dark and the storm, to seek out the distant sick, there will be a county medical center where the best of equip­ment and specialists will be ever on hand for immediate service, twenty-four hours a day. So too with veterinary service and all other basic necessities of rural life.

Cooperation is growing more and more popular. It is infinitely better than the pioneer type of stubborn individualism that has prevailed in America. It represents, however, the highest level which the peasantry of Europe has been able to reach, after centuries of struggle. It has gone about as far as it can go in Siberia and Denmark, where the dairy farmers especially have greatly bettered themselves through their unions. But such organizations are inferior to the Western corporations in every respect. They are slower in action, less competent to plan far ahead, less daring in their programs of improvement and experi­mentation, and less adequately financed for large operations. Above all, they cannot take full advantage of modern inventions and methods, chiefly because, at the bottom of every cooperative, you find a collection of individual operators who refuse to be graded and assigned to work that barely employs their mental and physical abilities.

In a few spots of our own Middle West we see how necessity has started farm owners in the right direction, in spite of them­selves. As farmers have been failing right and left out there, their acres have been thrown back on the banks to whom they owed money or on mortgage holders who were themselves retired farmers. Merely to salvage their investments the assign­ees have, in a conspicuous instance or two, called in a well trained farm manager and turned over to him dozens or even scores of farms in one region with orders to make the most of them. Such huge profits have been earned, after one or two seasons of struggle to get the deteriorated land into shape, that other owners of farms have imitated the procedure. In Iowa, for instance, men who have long been leasing to tenant farmers find it more profitable to alter the leases so as to leave the entire management in the hands of themselves or some agronomist, while the tenant simply carries out instructions and takes his share of the profit. This happens to be astonishingly like the newest form of employee profit-sharing adopted by progressive corporations; and there are reasons to believe that it may turn out to the advantage of all concerned, while serving as a natural transition to corporation farming.

Whatever may prove to be the wisest methods of accomplishing it, we may be sure that an essential feature of the final reform program will be an enormous reduction in the number of farms and farm managers. Instead of 6,500,000 farms, we shall have perhaps 200,000. By averaging only 2,500 acres of tilled land each, these large and well managed establishments will take care of our entire improved acreage, which is around 500,000,000 acres. Adequately capitalized and scientifically managed, the 200,000 farms of the New Order will derive fully 25 per cent more food products from their acreage than our coolies now get. They will employ about the same number of farm hands per production unit as farmers now do; about one man for every 26 acres of tilled land. And nearly all of the small farmers who are now starving and overworking themselves and their families will become decent laborers, well fed, well housed, and generally well cared for.

Many forces are now at work toward this wholesome end. Look at the recent colossal investment of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. After having sold the controlling interest in the $40,000,000 Equitable Building in New York City, it decided to invest no less than $10,000,000 in an immense farm colony in Florida. A tract of 30,000 acres was bought south of Tampa, houses and hotels and highways were built, and the balance of the land divided into five- and ten-acre farms for inten­sive winter truck gardening under central management but with individual ownership of the farms. The site was selected after a study revealed that the average annual profit in the region over a five-year period, good years and bad, good farmers and bad all lumped into the measure, was $479.73.

Money will slowly flow into regions of high yield like this one. It will never flow into regions of poor yield and no profit. This means that millions of acres now under coolie cultivation will in time revert to grass or timber or even swamp, while the best millions of acres will become modern food factories, well capitalized and well managed, with all the new methods of unit operation and mass production and mass distribution adapted as far as possible to the industry.

And how about jobs for our Best Minds? I cannot see where even one can be adequately employed. Good managers, yes. Superintendents, yes. Salesmen, yes. Accountants, yes. Gang foremen, yes. And there the list of superior workers ends, save for a sprinkling of research scientists who might number as high as 2,500 or 3,000 for the entire country. These would be agronomists of the highest type, some of them specializing more narrowly in economic entomology, soil chemistry, or climatology, and so on. They would easily handle all the problems that might arise. For, as you must keep in mind whenever we talk about the productivity of the Best Minds, what one man discovers by scientific research almost immediately becomes common property. If we have five hundred entomologists all working on the boll weevil and the Japanese beetle, but under various agencies public and private, they are practically all working for everybody who needs their services. Their discoveries are promptly pub­lished, and their opinions on special application techniques may be had for the asking.

I conclude then that a careful job analysis of farming as it may become in the near future reveals no appreciable number of openings for men and women of 130 I.Q. or better. The best we can say is that many of our Best Minds who enjoy the country life and have other means of support besides tilling the soil may prefer to live on small farms, or even to own one of the great corporation farms of the future, in part or in whole. I dare say the countryside of 1975 will be dotted with the homes of such persons. But they do not count in our present reckoning. For we are seeking jobs which demand the highest intelligence and which will give the jobholder a living suited to his nature and nurture.

So much for the state of affairs in the days of our grandchildren. Now let us glance at conditions closer at hand. Let us see whether our Best Minds may not find at least a temporary refuge and profit in farming before the Agrarian Revolution comes to an end in days far off. This investigation must be made largely because there is a strong belief among some vocational psychologists and more progressive farmers that the general level of intelligence is steadily rising among our agrarians; that living conditions are improving; and that there is a genuine opportunity for the higher mental types of Americans to go into farming. Sundry well informed farm journal editors, as well as Farm Bloc leaders, have been assuring their followers for some years that this upward trend is going on and must continue. It sounds as if thousands of Best Minds might find themselves in modern farming.

In this they have been supported by sundry radical eugenists and by some vocational psychologists. Let us consider the arguments of these latter.

Huntington and Whitney reason as follows:
In order that agriculture may occupy its rightful position in this country, what proportion of the farmers ought to be of the Builder type? Take, for example, a township where the township consists mainly of one or two hundred families of farmers. If such a township is to prosper and maintain the best American standards, it obviously needs at least a few local leaders, and a much larger number of lieutenants who follow the leaders promptly. Leaders and followers alike must keep up more or less with the affairs of their state and country, and even of the world, as well as with local affairs. Otherwise they cannot judge how a given policy will affect not only themselves and their neighbors but the whole community . . .

In addition to this, they . . . must keep up with the march of events in their own occupation. They must be able to weigh the different accounts of a new invention ... a new breed of cattle, a new crop, or a new way of caring for the forest. Builders with a talent for organi­zation are also needed . . .

If our farmers are to maintain what we proudly call the American standards, if they are to make a permanent success of local self-govern­ment, and render farming a highly respected and desirable profession, at least one farmer in ten and probably one in five ought to be a Builder. That means that one or two million farmers ought to be Builders—let us say a million and a half.1

The trouble with this vision is that it lacks a sound basis in economic fact, first of all. A standard township of 36 square miles contains 23,040 acres, of which fully one-third must be devoted to woodlots, highways, water courses or ponds, grazing fields, and sites for houses, barns, sheds and the like. This leaves about 15,000 acres to be tilled, provided the soil is fit for tillage. We may assume, as a general average, that not more than two-thirds of the 15,000 acres will earn a fair profit when tilled. I suspect I am making too liberal an allowance here; but let it stand, for the argument's sake. Now, a poor small farmer would till all the acres., regardless of profit; but a farm corporation would not. It would till only the 10,000 profitable acres. And a tract of this size is almost ideal for large-scale farming of the sort which will come more and more into vogue. What, now, will be the typical population of such a township when the Agrarian Revolution shall have been completed successfully?

A general manager, three or four farm superintendents under him, one agronomist perhaps, a chief mechanic in charge of the big machines, and beyond that nobody save common laborers. For a farm is a factory, and it must follow the inexorable law of the factory; division of labor, unit operations, and the alloca­tion of tasks to those who are not superior to them but barely competent. By no other way can the American farmer rise to enjoy the high standard of living which his brother in the city has long enjoyed.

Instead of there being one superior leader among farmers for every five or ten of our present farming population, there ought not be more than one such leader for every fifty or a hun. dred. Not a million and a half for the country at large, then, as Huntington and Whitney estimate, but rather around 150,000 at the very highest. And, of this number, not more than one-fifth need to be even Second-Best Minds. Leaders, yes. Intel­lects, no.

Now let us look at the psychologist's argument in favor of future improvements in farmers' intelligence.

Donald Laird, the vocational psychologist, has remarked that the tendency among farmers must be toward an ever higher intelligence level, as a result of natural selection.

The mental demands placed upon the farmer have rapidly increased. The mental demands upon the industrial worker have been growing less and less. So it is into industrial work that the farmer who cannot keep up with the race enters. There his thinking is done for him, and his work is much less complicated and taxing on the mind. It is a process of social natural selection with the intelligence of the remaining farmers increasing each week, due to their ranks being deserted by those less able to meet the increasing mental demands.

So far so good! Laird correctly depicts the trend. But he shows us only one phase of it. It is also true that, for every four or five inferior farmers who go to town to work in mill or factory, one superior farmer also goes because he understands how cruelly handicapped the individual farmer is in the struggle for an American living standard. And this superior emigrant usually has the highest energy and ambition. He is one of the country's elite. Old farmers call him "restless," "a wild colt," and "a fellow with no dirt sense nor horse sense." And they are right.

His mind works far too fast for farm work. The ideal farmer is, as all competent observers agree, a man of much slower mental velocities than the typical city business man. To deal with horses, cows, and poultry, you need a more gently moving mind and hand than you do when running a sewing machine or a lathe. So too in handling crops, in planning rotations, and in going through the ordinary day's work on the farm. Centuries of natural selections have thus weeded from the farms the nervous, the impatient, and the high-speed types of humanity. Slow caution and gentleness and easy-going ambition characterize the successful farmers.

This, by the way, accounts largely for the extraordinarily poor showing of the farmers in the Army intelligence tests. Out of forty-two occupations they ranked fifth from the bottom. To be sure, this was partly caused by the fact that a considerable percentage of moron and near-moron farm hands were classified as farmers. This was as absurd as it would have been to classify all men who work in automobile factories as manufacturers, or all school janitors as educators. But the city men who ran the tests did not understand this; hence the absurdity of their findings. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the genuine farmers did score badly according to the tests. But they did so chiefly because the Army tests, in their original form (now abandoned in large measure), were really mental speed tests. As Cattell and other psychologists have since pointed out, they measured alertness rather than fundamental intelligence. We know that high intelligence may move slowly as well as rapidly. We know that, for some kinds of work and responsibilities, the slow sort is infinitely better than the swift. Above all, does the slow mind prosper in farming.

We see then a steady and presumably swelling exodus of two male types from the farms; the inferior and the overalert minds. How about the female emigrants? Here we lack detailed information that is nation-wide and statistical. But the run of personal testimony everywhere is most uniform, as well as alarm­ing. Here are samples:

The clever girls and the pretty girls in our country all leave the farm as soon as they can. They will not stand the drudgery of housework on a farm. They see their mothers overworked, getting nowhere except into early graves, and having precious little time for even the simplest of life's enjoyments. Why should a girl stay on the farm anyhow?

The young men who stay on the farms and get along well are marry­ing mostly Scandinavian peasant girls. The better class of American girls won't marry a herd of cattle and five hundred hens and a quarter-section.

The small farmers around us seem to have married mostly stupid women, dull drudges who are content to live in the kitchen and cook and scrub all day.

A Pennsylvania school teacher caps the climax: I have visited most of the farms in the township within range of my school. Fully half of the housewives I have met are distinctly sub­normal in their intelligence. Many of them are complete morons, while half a dozen are true feebleminded types. The shocking thing, though, is that many of these inferior creatures are the wives of the solid, hard-working and competent small farmers. What will their children be? Just peasants, men with hoes and women with mops!

My personal impression, gathered from hundreds of farms, is pretty much the same. The focus of agrarian decay, on the human side, is not in the men. It is in the women. And all the current forces of American life are combining to draw, ever faster and faster, the refined, intelligent, particular woman from the countryside. Life, even on a good farm, bears heavily on the woman. Look on the picture of the drudgery!

The Department of Agriculture, a few years ago, surveyed 10,015 farm homes in 33 states, not including the South, where rural conditions are much worse than elsewhere. The aim was to see just how the farmer's wife spends her day, what facilities she enjoys and lacks, and what the causes of her discontent are. As you scan the findings, bear in mind that the homes described are not those of the poverty-stricken hill billies and white trash. They are typical farm homes in the prosperous farming sections of our land.

The working day of the average farm woman proved to be 11.3 hours, the year around. In summer it is 13.12 hours! Out of every 100 women, 87 never took any vacation. On a summer day, the farmer's wife can find only 1.6 hours of leisure; in winter she manages to get 2.4 hours a day for herself.

Six out of every ten do not even have a pump in their kitchens but must walk some distance to the spring or well to fetch water for cooking their meals and for washing. Each woman has, on the average, a seven-room house to care for; kerosene lamps to trim and fill; family washing to do, without any washing machines; and, just to keep her out of mischief, all the family sewing and darning to do.

In addition to caring for the house, cooking all meals and caring for the children, the farmer's wife usually takes full charge of the poultry and does all the baking for family and farm hands. One woman out of four also helps care for the live­stock. One out of every five also toils for six weeks each year in the fields, helping with the planting and harvesting. One out of every three helps with the milking. And more than half of them all must do all the churning.

How can intelligent or frail women endure this? They must leave!
One further important fact must be added to complete the picture of natural selection. There is an intelligence level below which cityward migration does not occur. Laird seems to think that all sorts of inferior farmers and farm workers tend to leave the country. But this is assuredly not true. All over the United States we find hordes far too inert, too dumb, and too ignorant to wander from their habitat in search of something better. Their accepted living standard, low as it is, suffices. Not only is their intelligence far below normal, but their temperament is such that scarcely any hardships of daily life can stir them to to discontent, still less to emigration. They are apathetic morons. Thousands of them dwell in the older farm regions of the North Atlantic states; and their number in the Midwest and South is steadily growing. I have met and talked with hundreds of them in New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the back valleys of the Appalachians. Whole families of them now living within fifty miles of Wall Street have never had ambition to visit any large city. Education cannot improve them. Put clean clothes on their backs, and they will be filthy within a week. Teach them all the virtues, and they will go serenely along their old paths. They remember little and suffer less. In a word, they are ideal low-grade farm hands, fit for the drudgery of the onion field and the barn yard. The few who have been tempted or forced to try work in the towns come back in a hurry; for the speed and the noise and the pressure of town work are too much for their simple nervous systems.

Now let us assemble the parts of this natural selection pattern. Two asymmetrical distributions develop, one for each sex. Among the men, those who tend to leave the farm are (1) the superintelligent who find in farm work nothing to occupy their minds, (2) the high-strung and very alert of considerable intelligence, (3) the energetic subintelligent, and (4) the physi­cally frail of all intelligence levels except the very lowest. Among women, the emigrants are chiefly (1) the superintelligent, (2) the superior intelligent, whether (a) alert or (6) apathetic-slow, (3) the average intelligent, especially those who are sensitive or rather frail. In other words, all the very low-grade types of both men and women tend to stay in the country; all the very alert, sensitive, and physically delicate men and women tend to leave; and more kinds of intelligent men remain on the farms than kinds of intelligent women. In the long run, then, the currents of farm life seem to be carrying us toward a peculiarly complicated state of affairs. The mental level of farm operators is now rising, as Laird has said. At the same time the level of women in the families of these operators is declining, though just how much or how fast we cannot estimate. As the living stand­ards of ordinary workers in American cities rise, however, we may be sure that the shift of superior farm girls and women to the cities will grow apace. On the other hand, the lowest grade of farm hands not only holds its own as to numbers but is increasing, especially in the poorer farming regions. And the more an agricultural region deteriorates, the larger will this degraded class become.

Now, it would be interesting but futile to speculate on the outcome of this differentiation into two intelligence classes over a period of centuries. Let us be content to sense its drift for the next few decades. Surely it is carrying us in the direction of the next great advance which will mark the arrival of the Agrarian Revolution. It sweeps onward—and, I feel sure, also upward— toward corporation farming on a scale hitherto undreamed of. It is bringing to its end the prescientific epoch of personal farm­ing, small-capital farming, and peonage.

As the intelligence of the farm operators rises during the next thirty, forty, or fifty years, and as their relative number declines, is not the stage plainly set for more and more intelligent cooper­ation? And must not the outcome of intelligent cooperation be, whether in its legal form or not, the adaptation of all the methods of industrial organization and machinery and techniques to farm problems? Must not the "unit operation" be adopted, as far as it can be, on the farm? Must not labor selection there be made on the same principle as in the factory? "Never allow a worker to do a piece of work which a less able man can do as well!" In farm work this has one inevitable meaning and application. It must lead in the long run to the complete separation of farm management from farm work. It must lead to a working ratio of field laborer to manager-expert more or less like that which is found the best in our factories; say, from twenty to fifty unskilled or semi-skilled toilers for each high-grade superintendent or expert. But this can be accomplished only with expensive machines and expensive organizers. In it the small farmer of today has no place. Hence he must go the way of the dinosaur and the dodo. Or, if he stays at farming, he must do so because he enjoys it as a way of life, not as a source of income.

And now we are back to the prediction I made a few minutes ago about the Agrarian Revolution! Whether we look to the inner evolution of farming, as now carried on, or to the immense external pressures and attractions which constantly alter the make-up of rural population and the pattern of rural work, we see the same final consequences. No chance for many Best Minds!

THE RACING EYE

Just to show you how useless it is to read faster than you take in the content, let me give you a simple test.

Here follows a page of fairly clear facts. See how fast you can read it. Probably you will dash through it in less than 50 seconds; and you may cover it in a few as 35 seconds.

The instant you have finished reading it, turn the page. Then try to write a summary of what you have read.

Have Your Paper And Pencil Ready Before You Begin!

A ski is a wooden snow-shoe. Implements for this purpose were used in ancient times. Xenephon describes the skin shoes with which the horses of the Armenians were shod. Snow-shoes have long been used by the Mongols of northwestern Asia. They were common in Scandinavia long before the Christian era.

Ancient skis were elongated, curved frames covered with leather. Those of the Skrid-Finnen of the sixteenth century were leather shoes, pointed at the toe, into which the feet were thrust up to the ankles. Modern skis are long, narrow, pieces of ash, oak, spruce or hickory, pointed and turned up for about a foot at the toe. Their length is usually the distance their wearer can reach upwards with his hand. Their width at the broadest part is about five inches, and their greatest thickness (just under the foot) about an inch and a quarter, tapering toward both ends. The under surface is usually smooth, although some skis have slight grooves to prevent the snow caking. They are kept in condition by oiling and waxing. Paraffin wax is used to produce a very highly polished surface, which greatly increases the speed of the runner. Long strips of sealskin are sometimes attached to the under side, to prevent side-slipping and assist the climber to make a direct ascent.

The skis are fitted to the feet by straps. There are a very large number of bindings, the commonest among novice runners being the huitfeld, and the most popular with experienced skiers the B. B. This is a metal binding without any straps, relying entirely on a hook-and-eye arrangement at the toe of the boot. The boots are made of deer hide. For use with the heel-strap bindings have specially shaped heels with a groove which hold the strap in place.

On level ground the skis glide evenly over the snow without being lifted from it, the heels being raised with each forward movement. Long gliding steps can be taken without fatigue, the runner having a stick about four feet or five feet long in each hand, to assist progression. These sticks have a spiked end, about seven inches above which a metal disk is fixed to prevent the stick sinking into the snow. Going down hill the skier places one foot slightly ahead of the other and runs in a crouched position with the feet close together and body leaning forward. A single staff was formerly used as a brake in coasting downhill, but the popularity of two sticks used chiefly for assistance in uphill work, but also for balance on the descent, is now the rule.

Now for the second exercise. Here follows another page with almost exactly the same number of facts. Read it as slowly as you can, without actually re-reading each line. You ought to be able to slow down to about 160 seconds.

Snow is crystallized vapour in the air. It forms at various heights according to latitude and temperature. It forms in great quantities within high clouds in all latitudes. Although most common to the polar region, it forms even in greater quantity within the north temperate regions.

Over the polar regions and upon lofty mountains, perpetual snow covers most of the land. On mountain or plateau regions therein, and on high mountains elsewhere, it accumulates to such depth that the pressure of the upper masses forms glaciers, sometimes covering thousands of square miles. It often accumulates to a depth of from one to four or more feet during the winter. The amount of snowfall varies markedly upon mountain tops and other locations even in the same parallel degree of latitude.

The crystalline varieties of snow are generally transparent and have brilliant facets that reflect light. They vary in size from one-one-hundredth to one-half inch in diameter, and fall to earth either singly or in flakes. Flake formation occurs usually during the mild, moist snowfalls at a ground temperature of 32 degrees or above. Cold clouds, always relatively dry, tend to produce smaller, slow-growing and solid types of crystal. Warmer clouds contain more moisture, tending to produce the larger, fast-growing, branchy type of crystals. The nuclear atoms of water are so arranged as to tend to cause the formation of triangular or hexagonal forms of snow crystals.

Most crystals of snow can be roughly grouped into two main classes, columnar and tabular. The columnar forms are hexag­onal columns. The tabular shapes, whether solid or branching, form on a thin, tabular plane. There are many irregular snow forms—icy spicules, frost-like forms, etc. During extreme cold or snowfall from high, cold clouds, tiny columns and solid hexago­nal or triangular plates are common.

Most snowfall shows branching tabular forms, granular forms, plates with branching exteriors, plate forms columns, needle forms, compound forms. The columnar and needle-like forms are much alike, varying in size, length, thickness, etc. Compound crystals show much greater variation in size, aspect, interior details, etc., of the end plates.

By far the most important and beautiful snow crystals are those of the tabular class. These crystals have delicate, starry, branching forms, solid plate forms and others equally beautiful. They are far more beautiful than crystals of any mineral species.

Snow crystals crystallize while floating about unsupported in the air. The atoms and molecules of snow move more freely while arranging themselves in crystal form than is possible when most crystals are formed. Snow crystals are formed directly from the atoms and molecules of water floating between the cloud droplets, as is illustrated by the fact that scanty snowfalls frequently occur from clear skies.

As a result of unfavorable cloud conditions, such as winds, overcrowding, the presence of fluid cloud droplets, etc., most tabular snow crystals fail to attain their natural beauty and symmetry. There is doubtless a somewhat invariable law of distribution of the various types of snow.

Tabular snow crystals are beautiful in outline and in interior design. This is due to the presence of air tubes and shadings in them, which appear dark when seen under certain conditions. These interior air tubes and shadings frequently appear as tiny rods, dots, lines, etc., in a symmetrical manner.

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