he audience." I suppose the hogshead stands for the big thoughts
of the speaker which he cannot manage at all without the active
cooeperation of the audience. The truth is, people assemble in a
lecture hall in a passive but expectant frame of mind. They are ready
to be pleased or displeased. They are there like an instrument to be
played upon by the orator. He may work his will with them. Without
their sympathy his success will not be great, but the triumph of his
art is to win their sympathy. Those who went to scoff when the Great
Preacher spoke, remained to pray. No man could speak as eloquently to
empty seats, or to a dummy audience, as to a hall filled with
intelligent people, yet Thoreau's ropes and hogsheads and pulling and
pushing truckmen absurdly misrepresent the true relation that exists
between a speaker and his hearers. Of course a speaker finds it uphill
work if his audience is not with him, but that it is not with him is
usually his own fault.

Thoreau's merits as a man and a writer are so many and so great that I
have not hesitated to make much of his defects. Indeed, I have with
malice aforethought ransacked his works to find them. But after they
are all charged up against him, the balance that remains on the credit
side of the account is so great that they do not disturb us.

There has been but one Thoreau, and we should devoutly thank the gods
of New England for the precious gift. Thoreau's work lives and will
continue to live because, in the first place, the world loves a writer
who can flout it and turn his back upon it and yet make good; and
again because the books which he gave to the world have many and very
high literary and ethical values. They are fresh, original, and
stimulating. He drew a gospel out of the wild; he brought messages
from the wood gods to men; he made a lonely pond in Massachusetts a
fountain of the purest and most elevating thoughts, and, with his
great neighbor Emerson, added new luster to a town over which the muse
of our colonial history had long loved to dwell.

IV

A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN

I

It is never safe to question Darwin's facts, but it is always safe to
question any man's theories. It is with Darwin's theories that I am
mainly concerned here. He has already been shorn of his selection
doctrines as completely as Samson was shorn of his locks, but there
are other phases of his life and teachings that invite discussion.

The study of Darwin's w