e dear-bought treasure has been wisely employed and safely
handed down. The eyes of the world are turned for that example
to us....

Let us, then, as we assemble on the birthday of the nation, as
we gather upon the green turf, once wet with precious blood--let
us devote ourselves to the sacred cause of constitutional
liberty! Let us abjure the interests and passions which divide
the great family of American freemen! Let the rage of party
spirit sleep to-day! Let us resolve that our children shall have
cause to bless the memory of their fathers, as we have cause to
bless the memory of ours!

--EDWARD EVERETT.

CHAPTER VIII

CONCENTRATION IN DELIVERY

Attention is the microscope of the mental eye. Its power may be
high or low; its field of view narrow or broad. When high power
is used attention is confined within very circumscribed limits,
but its action is exceedingly intense and absorbing. It sees but
few things, but these few are observed "through and through" ...
Mental energy and activity, whether of perception or of thought,
thus concentrated, act like the sun's rays concentrated by the
burning glass. The object is illumined, heated, set on fire.
Impressions are so deep that they can never be effaced.
Attention of this sort is the prime condition of the most
productive mental labor.

--DANIEL PUTNAM, _Psychology_.

Try to rub the top of your head forward and backward at the same time
that you are patting your chest. Unless your powers of cooerdination are
well developed you will find it confusing, if not impossible. The brain
needs special training before it can do two or more things efficiently
at the same instant. It may seem like splitting a hair between its north
and northwest corner, but some psychologists argue that _no_ brain can
think two distinct thoughts, absolutely simultaneously--that what seems
to be simultaneous is really very rapid rotation from the first thought
to the second and back again, just as in the above-cited experiment the
attention must shift from one hand to the other until one or the other
movement becomes partly or wholly automatic.

Whatever is the psychological truth of this contention it is undeniable
that the mind measurably loses grip on one idea the moment the attention
is projected decidedly ahead to a second or a third idea.

A fault in public speakers that is as perni