- termine immediately whether the text promises to be useful in connection with
the topic.
The illustrations will be found to have a secondary value in educational directions. A large amount of useful information is conveyed in compact paragraphic form. Facts from almost every department of human knowledge are to be found in these pages. Science has furnished many, including habits and doings of beasts and birds, curious and wonderful feats of surgery; ways and wonders of plant life; useful and valuable data from astronomy; the work of inventors, explorers and discoverers, etc., etc. From history and geography have been gleaned many important, curious, interesting incidents, facts, and sayings. From common and current life there will be found hundreds of useful and usable things worthy of being remembered. Literature has yielded a goodly store of her treasures. The religious life, especially as exprest in missionary work, is represented in numerous paragraphs. In short, merely as a store of useful information, this work should prove valuable.
Unusual care has been taken to make this work accurate. It is apparent without discussion that a public speaker does not wish to use, and ought not to use, even by way of illustration, material that is unreliable in any facts cited, or inaccurate in any statement made. Wherever there has been any doubt as to facts, authorities, or statements, the rule has been to exclude everything subject to such doubt.
This effort at accuracy has led to the practise of citing the source of each extract, wherever it could be ascertained. The occasional exceptions to this have been cases where the matter was a generally circulated piece of news or some extract wherein, from the nature of the case, no question of accuracy or authorship could be involved. In addition to this, there are a few extracts, the sources of which we have been unable to trace.
It is intended that the topic heads shall cover about all the subjects which a preacher or public speaker would ever wish to discuss. But it should be said that these topics are not intended as titles for discourses. They are topics that may sometimes serve as titles, but that are primarily subjects or ideas rather than titles. They are intended to be fairly comprehensive of the range of ideas of the average speaker, and may often represent only a subhead or a passage in his discourse.
If it happens that the user of this book, coming upon these topic heads from new angles and view-points, should not at first deem them exactly descriptive or definitive of the extract with which they appear, it need only be said that such difference of instinct and judgment is inevitable to different men, and if more is seen in any extract than the editors saw, that will add nothing to the confest sense of their undoubted fallibility.
The manner in which such a work as this shall be used will be determined—and should be—by each user for himself. It may not be wholly irrelevant, however, to suggest that so far as the prose extracts are concerned, they are mostly susceptible of profitable paraphrasing and of every sort of manipulation that
