a thorough treatment of these many and various elements in the limited space of this small book; most of them are matters of rhetoric and are taught in the schools and the college class-rooms. The present purpose is rather to point out the necessity of their individual understanding by the student and the engineer, and their application to the literary work that every technical man must do.

Listen to a first-class orator making an afterdinner speech which draws forth round after round of enthusiastic applause, and note his. graceful opening, how he commands your attention, his easy style, his timely and forceful gestures, his clear emphasis, and his climax, when he takes his seat amid the ringing cheers of the company. It appears simple, but when you try to do it, you do something or leave something undone that reacts upon the entire speech, and you fail to arouse the enthusiasm of your audience, although your subject matter may be as interesting and as valuable as that of the previous speaker. You may have the ideas but lack the ability to tell others just what you mean; you may have force in gesture, but lack the ability to emphasize properlyby a pause, a comparison, or an appropriate story.

The reason why many people fail in writing and speaking is not so much from the lack of ideas, of the use of bad English, as it is

that they try to do the whole thing at once without having mastered each single element. A gesture, like the movement of a baseball pitcher, or any other motion, consists of several parts, and each part must be mastered before the whole movement can be made perfectly; a good billiard stroke appears simple and graceful only because the expert has mastered the elements of that stroke-the holding of the cue, the necessary force, the angles of the table, the "English"; an instructor in machine design does not ask his students to design a steam engine until they have mastered the various parts of which the engine is made up. The easy and forceful speaker has, by study and practice, acquired an art that conceals an art; he has acquired the art of reasoning while on his feet; he has considered the aims of his speech in connection with the character and mood of his hearers; he has carefully collated and arranged his ideas; he has mastered the elements of style, gesture, and emphasis and applied them to this particular speech; he has studied his beginning and ending and his pauses; and during his apparently informal talk he is exerting his powers of attention, concentration, and observation. The Romans had a motto, "Divide et impera," "Isolate and conquer," which, applied to the present case, may be rendered, "Isolate what you have to master and master it part by part," to which

16

ENGINEERING LITERATURE

must be added the necessity of retaining p session of what has already been mastered fore advancing to new things-that is the ba of all thorough learning. In "Literary Eng neering" this principle applies equally to rea ing, writing, and speaking, and the engine who knows how to read, write, and speak w has a possession not only of mere intellectu and social advantage, but also of dollars an cents value, in whatever branch of the profe sion his work lies.

II

RHETORIC AND GRAMMAR

Rhetoric is the art of composition, written or spoken; it aims at expounding the principles that should govern all prose compositions or speech that is designed to influence the judgment or feelings of a reader or hearer, and therefore treats of everything that relates to grace or force of style-accuracy of expression, structure of periods, and figures of speech. Grammar is the science which treats of the principles of language and teaches the correct use of words for the expression of thought; it teaches us to speak, read, and write with correctness, according to the established usage, as deduced from language already in existence.

Rhetoric has been given many and various definitions by writers, both ancient and modern -Aristotle called it "The art of persuasion"; Whatley, "The art of conviction"; Campbell, "The art of discourse"-but all these writers agree on recognizing it as an art rather than as a science. An art implies underlying principles based on a science, and there has been, therefore, much question as to the science or

sciences upon which rhetoric is founded. Some claim the basis as logic, others as esthetics, and others as ethics, but if rhetoric is founded upon any single science, it is undoubtedly logic, through the medium of grammar.

Grammar investigates the relations between words and ideas, examines structure of speech in general, and treats of the essentials of the language. It receives the materials of thought formed into general notions, or concepts, judgments, and reasonings; expresses them with due regard to purity, propriety, concord, and precision, and turns them over to rhetoric to be woven into discourse with clearness, energy, elegance, and special adaptation to the ends that the writer or speaker has in view. Grammar deals with the words and the sentence only; rhetoric, with the words, sentence, paragraph-the entire composition or discourse. Grammar teaches rules, and regards correct expression as an end in itself; rhetoric teaches principles, and regards expression as merely a means to an end. Grammar makes a distinction between the right and the wrong; rhetoric between the good and the better.

In both writing and speaking, single words would suffice to express detached, individual ideas-a book could be indicated by the single word "book"-but thought is made up of related ideas, necessitating the combination of words into sentences, sentences into para