| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: exception of some valleys and of a fringe of low land on
the coast, a broad barrier; we shall then have the two
zoological provinces of North and South America strongly
contrasted with each other. Some few species alone have
passed the barrier, and may be considered as wanderers from
the south, such as the puma, opossum, kinkajou, and peccari.
South America is characterized by possessing many peculiar
gnawers, a family of monkeys, the llama, peccari, tapir,
opossums, and, especially, several genera of Edentata, the
order which includes the sloths, ant-eaters, and armadilloes.
North America, on the other hand, is characterized (putting
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Finished by H. Rider Haggard: in Natal if she troubles her. Whatever chances, remember,
Macumazahn, that I have done my best to keep my word to you and
to protect you and your friends. Now I go to look on this
pricked bladder who was once a king."
He scrambled from the hut with slow, toad-like motions, while I
with motions that were anything but slow, grabbed the grey
catskin kaross and ensconced myself among the beerpots and mats
in such a position that my head, over which I set a three-legged
carved stool of Zikali's own cutting, was but a few inches to the
left of the door-hole and therefore in the deepest of the
shadows. Thence by stretching out my neck a little, I could see
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: men of the world especially were conspicuous for their really artistic
grace and spirit.
Elsewhere in Europe you will find elegant manners, cordiality, genial
fellowship, and knowledge; but only in Paris, in this drawing-room,
and those to which I have alluded, does the particular wit abound
which gives an agreeable and changeful unity to all these social
qualities, an indescribable river-like flow which makes this profusion
of ideas, of definitions, of anecdotes, of historical incidents,
meander with ease. Paris, the capital of taste, alone possesses the
science which makes conversation a tourney in which each type of wit
is condensed into a shaft, each speaker utters his phrase and casts
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