Nor could he have foreseen how we could use the Internet to obtain information on every known subject, so we can read it on a screen in our homes and even print it as well if we want to.

Computers have become smaller and smaller, more and more powerful and cheaper and cheaper.

This is what makes Leon Bagrit's predictions particularly remarkable.

If he, or someone like him, were alive today, he might be able to tell us what to expect in the next fifty years.

Lesson 52 Mud is mud 实事求是

My cousin, Harry, keeps a large curiously-shaped bottle on permanent display in his study.

Despite the fact that the bottle is tinted a delicate shade of green, an observant visitor would soon notice that it is filled with what looks like a thick, greyish substance.

If you were to ask Harry what was in the bottle, he would tell you that it contained perfumed mud.

If you expressed doubt or surprise, he would immediately invite you to smell it and then to rub some into your skin.

This brief experiment would dispel any further doubts you might have.

The bottle really does contain perfumed mud.

How Harry came into the possession of this outlandish stuff makes an interesting story which he is fond of relating.

Furthermore, the acquisition of this bottle cured him of a bad habit he had been developing for years.

Harry used to consider it a great joke to go into expensive cosmetic shops and make outrageous requests for goods that do not exist.

He would invent fanciful names on the spot.

On entering a shop, he would ask for a new perfume called ' Scented Shadow' or for ' insoluble bath cubes'.

If a shop assistant told him she had not heard of it, he would pretend to be considerably put out.

He loved to be told that one of his imaginary products was temporarily out of stock and he would faithfully promise to call again at some future date, but of course he never did.

How Harry managed to keep a straight face during these performances is quite beyond me.

Harry does not need to be prompted to explain how he bought his precious bottle of mud.

One day, he went to an exclusive shop in London and asked for ' Myrolite'.

The shop assistant looked puzzled and Harry repeated the word, slowly stressing each syllable.

When the woman shook her head in bewilderment, Harry went on to explain that ' myrolite' was a hard, amber-like substance which could be used to remove freckles.

This explanation evidently conveyed something to the woman who searched shelf after shelf.

She produced all sorts of weird concoctions, but none of them met with Harry's requirements.

When Harry put on his act of being mildly annoyed, the assistant promised to order some for him.

Intoxicated by his success, Harry then asked for perfumed mud.

He expected the assistant to look at him in blank astonishment.

However, it was his turn to be surprised, for the woman's eyes immediately lit up and she fetched several bottles which she placed on the counter for Harry to inspect.

For once, Harry had to admit defeat.

He picked up what seemed to be the smallest bottle and discreetly asked the price.

He was glad to get away with a mere twenty pounds and he beat a hasty retreat, clutching the precious bottle under his arm.

From then on, Harry decided that this little game he had invented might prove to be expensive.

The curious bottle, which now adorns the bookcase in his study, was his first and last purchase of rare cosmetics.

Lesson 53 in the pubiic interest 为了公众的利益

The Scandinavian countries are much admired all over the world for their enlightened social policies.

Sweden has evolved an excellent system for protecting the individual citizen from high-handed or incompetent public officers.

The system has worked so well, that it has been adopted in other countries too.

The Swedes were the first to recognize that public officials like civil servants, police officers, health inspectors or tax-collectors can make mistakes or act over-zealously in the belief that they are serving the public.

As long ago as 1809, the Swedish Parliament introduced a scheme to safeguard the interest of the individual.

A parliamentary committee representing all political parties appoints a person who is suitably qualified to investigate private grievances against the State.

The official title of the person is ' Justiteombudsman', but the Swedes commonly refer to him as the 'J.O.' or ' Ombudsman'.

The Ombudsman is not subject to political pressure.

He investigates complaints large and small that come to him from all levels of society.

As complaints must be made in writing, the Ombudsman receives an average of 1,200 letters a year.

He has eight lawyer assistants to help him and he examines every single letter in detail.

There is nothing secretive about the Ombudsman's work, for his correspondence is open to public inspection.

If a citizen's complaint is justified, the Ombudsman will act on his behalf.

The action he takes varies according to the nature of the complaint.

He may gently reprimand an official or even suggest to parliament that a law be altered.

The following case is a typical example of the Ombudsman's work.

A foreigner living in a Swedish village wrote to the Ombudsman complaining that he had been ill-treated by the police, simply because he was a foreigner.

The Ombudsman immediately wrote to the Chief of Police in the district asking him to send a record of the case.

There was nothing in the record to show that the foreigner's complaint was justified and the Chief of Police strongly denied the accusation.

It was impossible for the Ombudsman to take action, but when he received a similar complaint from another foreigner in the same village, he immediately sent one of his lawyers to investigate the matter.

The lawyer ascertained that a policeman had indeed dealt roughly with foreigners on several occasions.

The fact that the policeman was prejudiced against foreigners could not be recorded in the official files.

It was only possible for the Ombudsman to find this out by sending one of his representatives to check the facts.

The policeman in question was severely reprimanded and was informed that if any further complaints were lodged against him, he would be prosecuted.

The Ombudsman's prompt action at once put an end to an unpleasant practice which might have gone unnoticed.

Lesson 54 Instinct or cleverness？是本能还是机智？

We have been brought up to fear insects.

We regard them as unnecessary creatures that do more harm than good.

We continually wage war on them, for they contaminate our food, carry diseases, or devour our crops.

They sting or bite without provocation; they fly uninvited into our rooms on summer nights, or beat against our lighted windows.

We live in dread not only of unpleasant insects like spiders or wasps, but of quite harmless ones like moths.

Reading about them increases our understanding without dispelling our fears.

Knowing that the industrious ant lives in a highly organized society does nothing to prevent us from being filled with revulsion when we find hordes of them crawling over a carefully prepared picnic lunch.

No matter how much we like honey, or how much we have read about the uncanny sense of direction which bees possess, we have a horror of being stung.

Most of our fears are unreasonable, but they are impossible to erase.

At the same time, however, insects are strangely fascinating.

We enjoy reading about them, especially when we find that, like the praying mantis, they lead perfectly horrible lives.

We enjoy staring at them, entranced as they go about their business, unaware (we hope) of our presence.

Who has not stood in awe at the sight of a spider pouncing on a fly, or a column of ants triumphantly bearing home an enormous dead beetle?

Last summer I spent days in the garden watching thousands of ants crawling up the trunk of my prize peach tree.

The tree has grown against a warm wall on a sheltered side of the house.

I am especially proud of it, not only because it has survived several severe winters, but because it occasionally produces luscious peaches.

During the summer, I noticed that the leaves of the tree were beginning to wither.

Clusters of tiny insects called aphids were to be found on the underside of the leaves.

They were visited by a large colony of ants which obtained a sort of honey from them.

I immediately embarked on an experiment which, even though it failed to get rid of the ants, kept me fascinated for twenty-four hours.

I bound the base of the tree.

with sticky tape, making it impossible for the ants to reach the aphids.

The tape was so sticky that they did not dare to cross it.

For a long time, I watched them scurrying around the base of the tree in bewilderment.

I even went out at midnight with a torch and noted with satisfaction (and surprise) that the ants were still swarming around the sticky tape without being able to do anything about it.

I got up early next morning hoping to find that the ants had given up in despair.

Instead, I saw that they had discovered a new route.

They were climbing up the wall of the house and then on to the leaves of the tree.

I realized sadly that I had been completely defeated by their ingenuity.

The ants had been quick to find an answer to my thoroughly unscientific methods!

Lesson 55 From the earth：Greetings 来自地球的问候

Recent developments in astronomy have made it possible to detect planets in our own Milky Way and in other galaxies.

This is a major achievement because, in relative terms, planets are very small and do not emit light.

Finding planets is proving hard enough, but finding life on them will prove infinitely more difficult.

The first question to answer is whether a planet can actually support life.

In our own solar system, for example, Venus is far too hot and Mars is far too cold to support life.

Only the Earth provides ideal conditions, and even here it has taken more than four billion years for plant and animal life to evolve.

Whether a planet can support life depends on the size and brightness of its star, that is its ' sun'.

Imagine a star up to twenty times larger, brighter and hotter than our own sun.

A planet would have to be a very long way from it to be capable of supporting life.

Alternatively, if the star were small, the life-supporting planet would have to have a close orbit round it and also provide the perfect conditions for life forms to develop.

But how would we find such a planet?

At present, there is no telescope in existence that is capable of detecting the presence of life.

The development of such a telescope will be one of the great astronomical projects of the twenty-first century.

It is impossible to look for life on another planet using earth-based telescopes.

Our own warm atmosphere and the heat generated by the telescope would make it impossible to detect objects as small as planets.

Even a telescope in orbit round the earth, like the very successful Hubble telescope, would not be suitable because of the dust particles in our solar system.

A telescope would have to be as far away as the planet Jupiter to look for life in outer space, because the dust becomes thinner the further we travel towards the outer edges of our own solar system.

Once we detected a planet, we would have to find a way of blotting out the light from its star, so that we would be able to ' see' the planet properly and analyse its atmosphere.

In the first instance, we would be looking for plant life, rather than ' little green men'.

The life forms most likely to develop on a planet would be bacteria.

It is bacteria that have generated the oxygen we breathe on earth.

For most of the earth's history they have been the only form of life on our planet.

As Earth-dwellers, we always cherish the hope that we will be visited by little green men and that we will be able to communicate with them.

But this hope is always in the realms of science fiction.

If we were able to discover lowly forms of life like bacteria on another planet, it would completely change our view of ourselves.

As Daniel Goldin of NASA observed, "Finding life elsewhere would change everything.

No human endeavour or thought would be unchanged by it.'

Lesson 56 Our neighbour，the river 河流，我们的邻居

The river which forms the eastern boundary of our farm has always played an important part in our lives.

Without it we could not make a living.

There is only enough spring water to supply the needs of the house, so we have to pump from the river for farm use.

We tell the river all our secrets.

We know instinctively, just as beekeepers with their bees, that misfortune might overtake us if the important events of our lives were not related to it.

We have special river birthday parties in the summer.

Sometimes we go upstream to a favourite backwater, sometimes we have our party at the boathouse, which a predecessor of ours at the farm built in the meadow hard by the deepest pool for swimming and diving.

In a heat wave we choose a midnight birthday party and that is the most exciting of all.

We welcome the seasons by the riverside, crowning the youngest girl with flowers in the spring, holding a summer festival on Midsummer Eve, giving thanks for the harvest in the autumn, and throwing a holly wreath into the current in the winter.

After a long period of rain the river may overflow its banks.

This is a rare occurrence as our climate seldom goes to extremes.

We are lucky in that only the lower fields, which make up a very small proportion of our farm, are affected by flooding, but other farms are less favourably sited, and flooding can sometimes spell disaster for their owners.

One bad winter we watched the river creep up the lower meadows.

All the cattle had been moved into stalls and we stood to lose little.

We were, however, worried about our nearest neighbours, whose farm was low lying and who were newcomers to the district.

As the floods had put the telephone out of order, we could not find out how they were managing.

From an attic window we could get a sweeping view of the river where their land joined ours, and at the most critical juncture we took turns in watching that point.

The first sign of disaster was a dead sheep floating down.

Next came a horse, swimming bravely, but we were afraid that the strength of the current would prevent its landing anywhere before it became exhausted.

Suddenly a raft appeared, looking rather like Noah's ark, carrying the whole family, a few hens, the dogs, a cat, and a bird in a cage.

We realized that they must have become unduly frightened by the rising flood, for their house, which had sound foundations, would have stood stoutly even if it had been almost submerged.