of wheat with a
pocket-knife would be a farmer.

Any good lecture of an hour and a quarter has meant ten to fifty hours'
hard reading. There is much in the reading that cannot possibly appear
in the lecture. Another lecture on a related theme or one widely
different, has probably suggested itself. I remember while rummaging in
history to find proofs and illustrations of "The Materialistic
Conception of History," which conception I was to defend presently in a
public debate, gathering the scheme of a course of four lectures on the
significance of the great voyages of the middle ages--a course which
proved very successful when delivered about a month later.

Again, the reading furnishes a great deal of material on the question of
the lecture itself which cannot be put into it for sheer lack of time.
This is why a lecture always educates the lecturer much more than it
does the hearer. The hearer therefore labors under two great
disadvantages. First, he forgets much that he hears, and, second, there
is so much that he does not hear at all.

The first handicap can be removed by the printing of the lectures. The
second is not so easily disposed of.

A lecturer may state in three minutes an idea which has cost many days'
reading. The idea has great importance to the speaker and, if he is a
master of his art, he will impress its importance on his hearers. That
is what his art is for. But that idea will never illume the hearer's
brain as the lecturer's until the hearer knows as does the lecturer what
there is back of it.

There is only one way in which this can be done--the hearer must have
access to the same sources of knowledge as the lecturer. This does not
necessarily mean that every hearer should have a lecturer's library. It
does mean, however, that there are some books which should be read by
both.

The lecturer himself is the best judge as to which books belong to this
category. In number they range anywhere from a dozen up, according to
the ambitions of the reader.

My method of dealing with this problem has been to take one book at a
time, tell the audience about it and see that the ushers were ready to
supply all demands. In this way I have sold more than two whole editions
of Boelsche's book "The Evolution of Man." In one week speaking in half
a dozen different cities I sold an entire edition of my first book
"Evolution, Social and Organic." One Sunday morning this spring at the
Garrick meeting at the close