before you begin. Are you sure that
it is worthy of thorough study? Is it the last or best work on the
subject? And if you advance, note in a separate memorandum book your
criticisms on the author's method and the soundness of his views. These
criticisms will help keep up your interest in the Abstract, and at the
close enable you to suggest modifications, additions, excisions, or a
refutation.

Three things are required: (1) To learn =how= to abstract; (2) To =make=
one, at least, such abstract; and (3) To =learn= it when made.

HOW TO MAKE ABSTRACTS.

Let the ambitious student make an Abstract of any chapter of John Stuart
Mill's Logic, and then compare his work with the Analysis of this same
chapter by the Rev. A. H. Killick (published by Longmans), and he will
at once see the enormous difference between the essentials and the
non-essentials--the difference between the subject of discussion and the
_explanation_ or _exposition_ of it. The student's abstract, if printed,
would extend over twenty to thirty pages. Mr. Killick's only occupies
two to five pages. But do not reverse the process and read Mr. Killick's
Analysis first and then make your Abstract. The latter, however, is _the
easier_, _the usual_, and _the useless_ method. Let the student continue
this comparison till he attains very nearly the brevity and
discrimination displayed by Mr. Killick. Or, if he prefers History, let
him write a summary of any chapter of Green's "Short History of the
English People," and then compare his digest with Mr. C. W. A. Tait's
Analysis of the same chapter (now bound up with Green's History, as
lately published in England). It would be a capital training for the
student to abstract the whole of Green's work and compare his abridgment
of each chapter with that of Mr. Tait. After considerable practice in
this way in making Abstracts and _comparing his work with that of such
Masterly Abstractors_ as Dr. Killick and Mr. Tait, the student who needs
this training is prepared to make abstracts of his own text-books.

Any other work of which an Abstract is published will serve the student
as well as the above. There were formerly published Abstracts of several
law books. And there may be other works whose abstracts are available to
the ambitious student.

Abstracts would be very amusing if they did not indicate an almost
total failure of educational training in the matter of _thinking for
one's self_. Recently a Pupil brought me