uilding your opening and closing sentences.

Probably the best form of lecturing is to speak from a few pages of
notes. A clearly defined skeleton, in a lecture, as in an animal, is the
sure sign of high organization, while it is desirable to fill in the
flesh and clothes with a pen beforehand, it will be well to learn to
deliver it to the public with nothing but the skeleton before you.

In course lectures, quotations must be read, as a rule, as there is not
time enough between lectures to commit them to memory. But where the
same lecture is given repeatedly before different audiences, this
condition does not exist, and the quotations should be memorized.
Frequent quotations, from the best authorities, is one of the marks of a
good lecture, as of a good book.

A good plan is to write out the skeleton of the lecture fully at first,
say fifteen or twenty note book pages, then think it carefully over and
condense to about ten. A really good, well organized lecture where the
lecturer has had ample time, or when he has already delivered it a few
times, should be reducible to one or two pages of notes.

This skeletonizing is a good test of a lecture. A mere collection of
words has no skeleton. Instead of comparing with a mammal at the top of
the organic scale, it is like a formless, undifferentiated protozoon at
the bottom.

As an example of a skeleton, here are the notes of the lecture with
which I closed the season at the Garrick in May, 1907:

SOCIALISM AND MODERN ETHICAL SCIENCE

(1) The general confusion on this question.
(2) The inroads of positive science into this field.
(3) The historical schools of Ethics:
(1) The Theological.
(2) The intuitional.
(3) The utilitarian.
(1) Define these;
(2) explain;
(3) criticise.
(4) Modern science endorses utilitarianism.
(5) This still leaves unsettled the problem of who
shall determine what is of utility to society?
(6) Marx gave the answer--The ruling class.
(7) They rule because they control society's foundation,
its mode of production.
(8) The working class, in order to enforce its own
ethics must control society at its base; it must take
possession of the means of production.

When I first delivered this lecture I had about twenty pages of notes
nearly twice the size of this book page, the three items, "define,"
"explain," "criticize,