y a foreign
language merely to give an opportunity for early study to those who are
to go on in the university with language courses. A mature university
student that has a real interest in language and literature can begin
his language study in the university and make rapid progress. Some of
the best classical scholars whom the author knows began their language
study in the university. While it would have been of some advantage to
them to have begun their language study earlier, there are so few who
should go into this kind of work that society cannot afford to make
provision for their beginning the study in the high school.

The selection and arrangement of the studies in the curriculum must be
based on other grounds than the laws of memory. What children make most
progress in and need most to know are the concrete things of their
physical and social environment. Children must first learn the
world--the woods and streams and birds and flowers and plants and
animals, the earth, its rocks and soils and the wonderful forces at work
in it. They must learn man,--what he is and what he does and how he does
it; how he lives and does his work and how he governs himself. They
should also learn to read and to write their mother tongue, and should
learn something of that great store of literature written in the mother
tongue.

The few that are to be scholars in language and literature must wait
till beginning professional study before taking up their foreign
language; just as a person who is to be a lawyer or physician must also
wait till time to enter a university before beginning special
professional preparation. The child's memory for abstract conceptions is
particularly weak in early years; hence studies should be so arranged as
to acquaint the child with the concrete aspects of the world first, and
later to acquaint him with the abstract relations of things. Mathematics
should come late in the child's life, for the same reason. Mathematics
deals with quantitative relations which the child can neither learn nor
remember profitably and economically till he is more mature. The child
should first learn the world in its descriptive aspects.

=Memory and Habit.= The discussion up to this point should have made it
clear to the reader that memory is much the same thing as habit. Memory
considered as retention depends upon the permanence of the impression on
the brain; but in its associative aspects depends on connections between