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Up until the publication of Alexander Bain's English Composition and Rhetoric in 1866, most American college textbook rhetorics were organized around belletristic discourse classifications; that is, they divided up the subject of writing into established literary forms such as orations, history, romance, treatises, sermons, and the like. Bain's textbook brought about what we now, thanks to Thomas Kuhn, refer to as a paradigm shift, sweeping away these belletristic schemes and substituting five forms-Description, Narration, Exposition, Persuasion, and Poetry-that, with the exception of Poetry, have survived up to the present in Freshman Composition and are known in the trade as the Modes of Discourse. 1 In recent years, however, another paradigm shift has been taking place, and Bain is now often held responsible for the impoverishment of rhetoric in the late nineteenth century.2 Regrettably, in the campaign to undo the damage he did, little attention has been paid to his intellectual milieu or to the question of why he did what he did, with the result that the true historical importance of the modes has been obscured. The most noteworthy feature of Bain's English Composition and Rhetoric-and the reason perhaps for its popularity among his contemporaries-may be its reliance upon the scientific thought of the day. During the previous century in Bain's native Scotland, Adam Smith, George Campbell, Hugh Blair and Joseph Priestley had sought to redefine the basic aims of rhetoric, largely in an effort to accommodate the increasingly prestigious natural sciences. As Wilbur Samuel Howell has argued, the classical rhetorical systems offered little guidance to the scientist in presenting his discoveries to the learned community and to the public at large: they conceived of persuasion as an appeal to commonplaces rather than facts, they depended for methods of proof on the logic of deduction rather than induction, they encouraged the use of ornamental figurative devices rather than plain statements, and in general they were designed for popular exhortation rather than for disseminating fresh knowledge.3 In his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke points the way to-