ported as it was by a vast array of facts collected, organized, and reasoned over for many patient years. Not only that, but he made many important contributions to science in other fields not related to evolution. He wrote a whole book, for example, on the habits of the earthworm.

What I want to emphasize just here, as this chapter is devoted to the subject of our memories and how to make the most of them, is that we must not make too much of them in the sense that we are to suppose that the mere act of memorizing is, by itself, of special importance. We find that great men, including those we call "geniuses," were like other people in this respect-some had wonderfully good memories, others had very poor ones; just as they differed in some being tall, some short; some light, some dark; some fat, and some lean. All of us are apt to remember best the things in which we are intensely interested, and in this, great men are like us; but like the rest of us, they differ in native retentiveness.

And yet to read what they write about them, you'd think the memory systems that are constantly being advertised by the "memory doctors," and as constantly being sold, were an absolute insurance of success. "Develop your memory, and the world is yours!" -such, in effect, is the claim. Now in the first place, I don't need to remind you, I'm sure, that there is no such thing as a separate faculty of memory, only separate memories stored in different compartments of the brain. As a consequence, men have good memories for some things, poor memories for others. Napoleon, for example, could remember incredible details about things that had to do with his military operations, yet he never did learn to spell; as an instance, he constantly wrote the name of Talleyrand, his great minister of foreign affairs, "Tayerand," or "Tailleran."

And even yet I have n't told you the worst thing about these artificial memory systems: this very loading of the mind with a lot of mere facts is bad in itself. "The mind," said a great American educator, the late Dr. W. T. Harris, "can become so overloaded with lumber that there is no room for a workshop." All of us have more facts in our heads already than we make use of. The important thing is to learn to use them, and the most valuable things we remember are those we acquire in the act of using those we already havegeographical facts, for instance, that we learn when we write a story of an imaginary busi

HOW DARWIN SOLVED THE BOMB PUZZLE

While, like many other thinkers of the philosophic type, Darwin had a poor verbal memory, he was a very close observer; and this, combined with the reasoning powers he developed in connection with his observations and his reading, made him the man he was.

The interesting story he read in the inside of a volcanic bomb (shown in our picture) will give you a good example of the workings of the scientific mind. These bombs are masses of lava, shot whirling through the air from the mouth of the volcano. Cooling, they assume shapes roughly resembling a sphere or a pear. Knowing this, suppose I ask you why the cells in the center are largest (you see they are); why they decrease toward the exterior of the bomb; why the bomb has that strip of solid shell; and why this shell is overlaid on the outside by finely cellular lava. See how near you can come to the answers before you read how Darwin worked them out-remember he saw only what you see in the picture.

(1) The exterior cooled rapidly in the state we now see it, and the cells are of their original size. (2) The centrifugal force, caused by the whirling of the bomb, crowded the lava toward the surface and so made the dense shell. (3) This same centrifugal force, relieving the pressure from the center, allowed the heated vapors to expand the cells, and so made them much larger than they were originally. particular part of the business they are concerned with. They have books and bookkeepers, and card-catalogues with brief notations of correspondence with customers and

prospective customers-what are called "follow-up" systems. A piece of carbon paper in the typewriter remembers for them just what they wrote. Moreover, tending to one's business, whatever it may be, creates in the brain a system--those little library files we saw at headquarters-that takes care of the facts and plans relating to that business. You'll not catch Father failing to get off one of his business letters, as he did Mother's letter to the dressmaker; not because he would n't to anything in the world for her,you know that, but because he is n't in the habit of taking letters out to post them. If Mother would only give him an envelop to mail, just an empty one, addressed to herself, every day for a week or ten days, Father would get so he would never fail to mail the real letters when they came along. But you see, it would n't pay. It would be too much like burning a house to roast a pig, as the Chinaman did in Lamb's funny story. And it's a good deal that way with artificial memory systems. They train you to remember a lot of miscellaneous things that you would n't want to use once in a thousand times, in order that you may remember some one thing you really require. The attending-to-your-dailybusiness memory system remembers for you the things you habitually need, and you don't have to take any time off to learn it. Just tend to your business, that 's all!

More

Lawyers don't attempt to remember the endless court decisions that are constantly being ground out in the mills of the law. They keep posted on the general trend of these decisions, but whenever they want the details, they look them up by means of the excellent indexes of the law reports. over, the mind has a way of seizing on things of special interest, so that when, among the decisions in the reports, the lawyer comes on a case bearing on one of his own, the main facts and principles involved lodge in his memory.

This habit of the mind, by which new thoughts, arguments, ideas, and so on, seem to hunt out and "snuggle in" with their relatives in the brain,-birds of a feather flocking together, is called the Law of Apperception. It is so important that it was given that big name to hold it down. One curious thing about this law is that it shows that people often think they think things that they don't really think at all! And because it's a bad habit to get into, I am going to say more about it in some future chapter.

Life is too busy and precious a thing to

waste any of it trying to remember things just for the sake of the memory training. Engagements and telephone numbers and things like that should be written down. History information should be grouped around a few dates, and the great movements and facts for which they stand. In science, get hold of the big principles.

In spite of all I have been saying against memory systems in general, there is one memory system which I can't say too much for. While this system costs a little something, it costs no more than what each of us have. The system I am speaking of, of course, is "Mother Nature's Memory System." All we have to give in return for the use of it is the free loan of our five senses. As we saw when we went through the "Palaces of the Mind," all its wonderful treasures in the Art Gallery, the Auditorium, and the rest, were acquired in exchange for use by the brain of the five senses of touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing. Obviously then, the thing to do to improve our memory habits, as well as increase these treasures of the brain, is to cultivate the senses by exercising them; by observing closely things worth seeing, and by forming the habit of always listening carefully to things worth hearing.

One of the greatest benefits of nature study is that it not only stores our minds with things which it is most interesting to know, and that form the basis and beginning of so many of the sciences in which men specialize, but it trains the senses; for example, in getting to know the various trees by their leaves and fruit and comparative anatomy; the birds by their notes as well as by their color and form; the various types of clouds, the color, form, and odor of flowers, and the habits of animals. And what is more, the cultivation of the memory in this way is closely related to the cultivation of the greatest thing of all, the thinking habit, the ability to think, say, and do things that will be of value and interest to the world. We can think of things and combine things, put two and two together, and so create new ideas, only in proportion as we can vividly conceive these things in our minds; and if these memories are the images of things we have seen, as most of our memories are, our vividness of conception will depend upon closeness of observation.

Some people can best remember a word, a name, or a fact if they see it in writing or in print; these are said to be "visual-minded." Others can remember best if they themselves

write it down; these are the "motor-minded." Others remember best what they hear, and so will get more when being read or talked to than when they read to themselves; these are the people of auditory or ear memory.

While I have just classified people as visual-minded, motor-minded, and so forth, I only did so so that you might distinguish these various ways of remembering in order to use them. The fact is that most people are not wholly of the auditory, visual, or motor-minded type. We all have ears, eyes, and fingers, and are helped by using them-by. hearing a thing, seeing a description or picture of it, and by writing about it; and above all, by making experiments with regard to it; or if it is a thing to be constructed, as in manual training, actually producing it. Because sight plays such a prominent part in most of our impressions of the great pageant of life, the visualizing habit is of corresponding importance. There is much significance in the expression "I see," meaning, "I understand"; and so with many other popular phrases which were first coined when the world was younger and there were fewer trashy books and no newspapers and people took a more spontaneous interest in their mental operations than we do to-day, when our mental warehouses are often so overloaded with lumber that we are pinched for room in our workshops.

And speaking not of this lumber, but of the brain, it is to be noted that it is n't the people who have the best natural memories that remember best. Owing to the unusual strength of their nerve tissues, there are people who can remember, without an effort, names, dates, prices, telephone numbers-all sorts of miscellaneous things, but who are unequal to the higher efforts of the mind and are not interested in things of that sort. The world of literature and art lies behind closed doors, as far as they are concerned. When it comes to remembering things worth keeping, the educated get on much more rapidly than the uneducated.

Another thing. Children, it is popularly assumed, have better memories than grown people, but this is not true. Careful experiments made with children themselves show this. Children, it is true, remember without effort more than adults do, but if both are set the same thing to memorize, something the children as well as the adults can understand, of course, the result is that the adult will memorize first and retain the longest. Not but that the child has the better of the

adult in the strength and plasticity of its brain, its readiness to record impressions, but the adult has a much greater power of concentrating attention; of "drawing a bead" on a thing, as Daniel Boone used to do on a bear, and so, like Daniel, they "get the bear."

Paying attention is not only the first great principle in memory, but it is pretty much the whole thing. You pay attention, and nature does the rest. Of this fact you will see notable examples when we come to the matter of remembering people's names, as we shall in a few moments. Sir William Hamilton, one of the distinguished explorers of the land of the mind, says the habit of paying attention is, "the eye of the mind." It is to the mind, he says, what the microscope and the telescope are to the bodily eye and "constitutes the better half of our intellectual power."

The trouble is that during school-days much of a child's attention in learning is apt to be of the push-cart variety; that is, it is forced from behind, and not pulled from in front by his interest in the thing to be learned. Yet the push-cart type of attention is n't the real thing at all. Listen! Carlyle is speaking:

Thy very attention, does it not mean an attentio, a stretching to? Fancy that act of the mind which all were conscious of, which none had yet named, when this new poet felt bound and driven to name it. His new, glowing metaphor was found adoptable, intelligible, and remains our name for it to this day.

The "new poet" Carlyle refers to, of course, was n't anybody in particular; he was simply one of those imaginary "first men" who, looking in on the Little People of the Mind, watched them at their work. You can see that Carlyle feels deeply what a fine thing it is for us that we have this faculty of reaching out and taking things in. And the beauty about it is that the more attention we pay out, the more we have left; for nature evidently regards it as a loan, and it all comes back with big interest.

II. MAKING PEOPLE STICK TO THEIR NAMES EVERY one who has been introduced to many people and who has n't?-knows how hard it is to make them stick to their names. The names come off, as it were, in our memory-files. There are the pictures of our new friends, as natural as life, but, for the life of us, we can't find their labels-the names that belong on these pictures. Yet no little thing

you can do will give so much pleasure to some one you have recently met as to call him promptly by name the next time you meet him! And looked at from a worldly standpoint, no investment compares in earnings with this name-remembering habit. It 's a large part of the merchant's stock in trade, and in the equipment of his salesmen; and if it hasn't sent many a man to Congress, it has put him a long way on the road. It was said of Henry Clay that he could be introduced to a hundred people at an evening reception, and a year afterward, on meeting any of them, he could at once call them by name. James G. Blaine had the same faculty; and most public men acquire it. Cæsar, it is said, knew the names of all the veterans in his devoted Tenth Legion of the Gallic Wars; and I 'll warrant you that was one great secret of his calm assurance when he said to the rest of his soldiers (who were in a panic at the thought of their first handto-hand fight with the blond giants of Ariovistus) that they were at liberty to remain behind while he alone, with the Tenth Legion, would march on. The fact that he remembered them as individuals and called them by name must have been one of the strongest reasons for their attachment to him.

Napoleon also had a remarkable memory of this sort, and had the reputation of knowing thousands of his veterans by name; although here, as in so many other things, he was up to his tricks. For, according to Bourrienne, at one time his private secretary, he would say to one of his aides:

"Ascertain from the colonel of such a regiment whether he has any man who served in Italy or Egypt, and learn his name and what he did and bring me the information." On the day of the review, Napoleon, the man having been pointed out to him, would approach, address him by name, and say: "Oh! So you are here! You are a brave fellow. I saw you at Aboukir. How is your old father?"

How Cæsar remembered the names of his men, or how Napoleon remembered so many, as he certainly did, it is doubtful if either of them could have told, although both were great practical psychologists, as all men who succeed in dealing with other men must be; that is, they understood human nature. The reason they probably could n't have told is that there is so little to tell-provided you remember in Nature's way. If you employ an artificial memory system, there is a great deal to tell. For example, if a man's name happened to be "Gielow,"-I met a man once by that name,-you can fix it in mind by re

membering that "gee," in horse-language, means "turn to the right"; this idea contrasted with "low," which is a direction neither to the right nor the left, helps in remembering it. Rather ridiculous? Yes, but as the memory expert who taught me the trick said, "The more ridiculous the association, the better it fixes in the mind things that have no logical relation"-such as people and their names. But this sort of association gets the mind into bad habits and merely serves a temporary purpose. In my case, I resorted to the memory trick only because I had failed to pay proper attention to the name at the time of introduction-the precious moment of the first impression. So I had to do the next best thing.

Such devices are useful in emergencies, but should be used only in emergencies. The simple way, and the one that fixes a name most firmly, is to pay close attention the first time you hear it; and in case of an introduction, look your new friend squarely in the face, instead of shifting the eyes, as in our natural shyness at meeting strangers we are so apt to do. The name and face are then duly entered in the "memory books" together and will come back together when wanted. But you must "catch the name." (How descriptive and significant some of these common phrases are!) And you must not only catch the name, but hold it; you must n't "fumble." Repeat it a few times to yourself. If you have an opportunity for conversation, address your new friend by name occasionally, as: "So you keep your back numbers of ST. NICHOLAS, Mr. Williams? I'm always looking up things for our history and other research work at school." Or, "How do you like the new serial story, Mr. Williams?"

If there is no opportunity for conversation for a while, and you are introduced to several people in succession, run back over the names of the people to whom you have already been introduced. If you go out much, or if, in later years, in your business or social life, you meet many people, you will find you will acquire the faculty of taking in a new name in one little room of your brain while a "recitation" in previous names is going on in another! You will also become more selfpossessed when introduced, and this is a great help. But to recall the names of a lot of people to whom you are introduced in rapid succession is one of the most difficult feats of memory. When you can do it, you can feel you 're about ready to graduate from the "memory school."