a rational way, referring it to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and consequences, and thus ciphering out its date by connecting it with theirs.  The artificial memory-systems, recommending, as they do, such irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the first landmarks in a system, or for such purely detached facts as enjoy no rational connection with the rest of our ideas.  Thus the student of physics may remember the order of the spectral colours by the word vibgyor which their initial letters make.  The student of anatomy may remember the position of the Mitral valve on the Left side of the heart by thinking that L.M. stands also for ‘long meter’ in the hymn-books.

You now see why ‘cramming’ must be so poor a mode of study.  Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal.  But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.  On the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure.  This is the reason why you should enforce on your pupils habits of continuous application.  There is no moral turpitude in cramming.  It would be the best, because the most economical, mode of study if it led to the results desired.  But it does not, and your older pupils can readily be made to see the reason why.

It follows also, from what has been said, that the popular idea that ‘the Memory,’ in the sense of a general elementary faculty, can be improved by training, is a great mistake.  Your memory for facts of a certain class can be improved very much by training in that class of facts, because the incoming new fact will then find all sorts of analogues and associates already there, and these will keep it liable to recall.  But other kinds of fact will reap none of that benefit, and, unless one have been also trained and versed in their class, will be at the mercy of the mere crude retentiveness of the individual, which, as we have seen, is practically a fixed quantity.  Nevertheless, one often hears people say:  “A great sin was committed against me in my youth:  my teachers entirely failed to exercise my memory.  If they had only made me learn a lot of things by heart at school, I should not be, as I am now, forgetful of everything I read and hear.”  This is a great mistake:  learning poetry by heart will make it easier to learn and remember other poetry, but nothing else; and so of dates; and so of chemistry and geography.

But, after what I have said, I am sure you will need no farther argument on this point; and I therefore pass it by.